Computer System Architecture

Read this book before reading anything else. It is clearly written. Brings you from the bottom to the top. Dont fall for new modern latest shiny expensive Comp Architecture books. They are impossible to study from.

I love this book. I am struck by its simplicity. How can a book be so simple, yet so clear in delivering the message, in a topic that is considered to be complicated? Computer architecture is not easy, but with the help of this book I was able to build a very solid foundation when I took the course. And even though it is an introductory book, I still refer to it in more advanced courses and related topics.

I found this book to be one of the most clearly written texts on the subject of computer architecture(as opposed to the terse, cryptic Astrom and Wittenmark books for control systems, for example.) Now, a professor can easily test around the basics of any text book by surprising students with unexpected special cases, exceptions, and boundary conditions. But, that is not the fault of the text book itself. If any of those tricks actually appeared in a text book, they would be ignored and he/she would find new ones to test. Noone can memorize how to think; knowing how to solve the examples in a textbook is only the beginning. That's why there are homework problems. Unpopular professor tricks aside, I think this is a great book on the topic and it gave me the skills to perform certain assignments on my own during my first engineering job...skills that my employer thought he would have to teach to all us newbies. I was glad I had this book in school.

It's hard for me to believe this book didn't get good reviews. It's an awesome book that succintly details the design of a CPU. The author uses a hands on approach by showing you how to design a simple CPU from scratch. Even though simple, this CPU has a useable set of instructions (including IO ones), interrupts, and a memory subsytem. RTL is used to convey what is done at each instruction cyle, which is great. For me, this is the first timeI see a practical application of RTL. The book could have been more interesting if it provides an implementation in VHDL, or Verilog, but i guess that's left as an excercise for the reader.

As a BA student for computer science, I found this book very helpfull in learning about how the computer's "guts" work, in courses of computer structure and computer architecture.The book introduces the different hardware components of the computer and the way they are all coordinated. It does so in a very simple ( yet not simplified ) manner, so that even "dummies" in this field ( like myself ) can get a very good comprehension of the fundamental approaches in computer design and architecture.