Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Morgan Kaufmann (1997), Edition: 2 Sub, Hardcover, 965 pages
Description
What's New in the Third Edition, Revised Printing The same great book gets better! This revised printing features all of the original content along with these additional features: Appendix A (Assemblers, Linkers, and the SPIM Simulator) has been moved from the CD-ROM into the printed book Corrections and bug fixesThird Edition featuresNew pedagogical featuresUnderstanding Program Performance -Analyzes key performance issues from the programmer's perspective Check Yourself Questions -Helps students assess their
User reviews
LibraryThing member sloDavid
Concepts are mostly explained well, but there are a couple things that *really* grate: 1-- the authors constantly reference material in the appendix on the CD. And 2-- this is the third edition and there are still a lot of mistakes. Some diagrams are explained imprecisely, leading the student to
If these guys only had better editors, this would probably be a 4-star book, because the big-picture stuff really is explained pretty well. If you want to understand floating-point numbers, machine code, the basics of memory, and how modern CPUs work, this text will help you out.
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think "huh?" until he realizes that the problem is simply in the wording of the explanation.If these guys only had better editors, this would probably be a 4-star book, because the big-picture stuff really is explained pretty well. If you want to understand floating-point numbers, machine code, the basics of memory, and how modern CPUs work, this text will help you out.
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LibraryThing member Tobias.Bruell
The book first gives an introduction into instruction-set-architectures using MIPS. Then in Chapter 4 a processor is constructed which implements (a part of) the MIPS architecture, while skipping many details. Chapters 5 and 6 describe memory and IO-interfaces, resp. Chapter 7 is about computers
I especially likes Chapter 5 since it gave me a deeper understanding of memory than the book by Harris (although I find the Harris book superior in any other respect). Most explanations are good enough to understand.
However, I would also say that many explanations are clumsy and hard to follow. It seems that not too much thought went into the formulations.
Often pieces of information are given in such a short paragraph that it is impossible to understand; maybe in these cases the authors only wanted to touch on a topic; maybe the passage was mindlessly shorted to make room for something else; in any case this style always leaves me back a bit frustrated. For people how already know this stuff, it might be nice to find the link, but that misses the purpose of a textbook.
Also, more than once I had the feeling that I am reading a text from economy/business lecturers, rather than computer scientists how love what they do. For example, chapter 6 contains long enumerations of different disks and goes into details about speed and cost payoffs, which I found hardly enlightening.
Chapter 7 on multi-processors is also very superficial. The whole thing only contains a single piece of code. Memory barriers or other synchronization primitives are never mentioned (only once in a previous chapter is the LL/SC instruction pair of MIPS mentioned, but again with much too little detail to understand thoroughly).
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with multiple processors. Every chapter has tons of exercises, at which I did not look.I especially likes Chapter 5 since it gave me a deeper understanding of memory than the book by Harris (although I find the Harris book superior in any other respect). Most explanations are good enough to understand.
However, I would also say that many explanations are clumsy and hard to follow. It seems that not too much thought went into the formulations.
Often pieces of information are given in such a short paragraph that it is impossible to understand; maybe in these cases the authors only wanted to touch on a topic; maybe the passage was mindlessly shorted to make room for something else; in any case this style always leaves me back a bit frustrated. For people how already know this stuff, it might be nice to find the link, but that misses the purpose of a textbook.
Also, more than once I had the feeling that I am reading a text from economy/business lecturers, rather than computer scientists how love what they do. For example, chapter 6 contains long enumerations of different disks and goes into details about speed and cost payoffs, which I found hardly enlightening.
Chapter 7 on multi-processors is also very superficial. The whole thing only contains a single piece of code. Memory barriers or other synchronization primitives are never mentioned (only once in a previous chapter is the LL/SC instruction pair of MIPS mentioned, but again with much too little detail to understand thoroughly).
Show Less
LibraryThing member nosborm
Best. Architecture. Book. Ever.
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1997
Physical description
965 p.; 9.4 inches
ISBN
1558604286 / 9781558604285