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Computer System Architecture (3rd Edition)
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Author: M. Morris Mano
List Price: $113.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0131755633
Publisher: Prentice Hall (19 October, 1992)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 151,890
Average Customer Rating: 2.64 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Great book to learn about the innards of a CPU
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 time
I 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.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Needs a little work...
I've grown a love hate relationship with this book.
I love it, because after attending a lecture in school and then reading the chapter from which the lecture was built on, I find the book to be an excellent resource of information. It'll clear up any confusion which I had, aswell as reitterating all the points discussed in class.
I hate it, because I can't read ahead. Anytime I have tried to read a chapter which we have not yet learned, I have had a difficult time grasping the concepts and gaining an overall perspective of what the chapter is trying to teach you.
If you are planning to learn all this material on your own without the benefit of a professor's teachings, then I probably would not reccommend this book to you. If on the other hand, you do have some other source of learning and are just looking for an additional source to keep your mind fresh on the topics (and maybe even learn a little more while your at it), then this book is for you.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Writing style is too difficult to understand.
Let me start off by saying that I consider myself to have an excellent knowledge of computers (including hardware, software, and software design) and a reasonable knowledge of hardware design and electronic circuits. Despite this fact, every time I finish reading a section of this book, I'm completely lost.
You ever hear the expression "this reads like stereo instructions"? Well I think the author of that expression first said that after reading this book.
I'm not an idiot, but this book is just written in a style that is way too difficult to understand. Sometimes I'm reading about a topic that I already know everything about, but I still can't understand what the book is talking about. I have to read and reread each sentence till I can finally safely conclude that "this" is what he's trying to say. However, if you have no knowledge of the topic prior to reading it, that is an impossible task.
So far, after reading each topic from this book (and being completely confused when I'm done), I've had to look the topic up on the internet, and within minutes I completely understand it. The topics aren't hard. They're almost easy, but his writing style is so difficult to understand that you feel like you're reading about nuclear physics.
If your a student and you have to read this book, I strongly reccommend that you don't get discouraged, and just turn to the internet to understand the material.
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