Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Third Edition, Revised

This book is a relatively generous two stars. I have been using this book for a college class and find it to be very poor. The material is not very well-organized. The explanations are often confusing and are generally not very thorough. There are not nearly enough examples, and they are not very helpful when they are there. They put a lot of the book on the CD, which is very annoying. The questions are not very good; they are often confusing or poorly worded and they sometimes cover stuff that is not explained well in the book.

What this book has been useful for, though, is a reference book. I keep it sitting on my desk at work (I am a computer programmer) and refer back to it now and then, especially for MIPS stuff. It is OK as a reference book, which is why I did not rate it 1 star.

In short, I wouldn't recommend trying to learn this material for the first time from this book, as you will probably find the book confusing. However, it may be of some value as a reference, particularly for MIPS architecture and assembly programming.

This book was used as the primary book for my last college class. The material is poorly laid out and very difficult to follow. Unless you are in your last year of CS or a Engineering student, do not buy this book. I even emailed one of the author's of the book to see if there was any other material available to help better understand the text, and his answer to me was, "you can buy the Advanced book." What a joke.

This textbook is up-to-date and awesome. The material it covers is conveyed in such a way that it is easy to underestand. The book chapeters can be read in any order as long as a basic understanding of the material exists. Definitely would recommend this textbook.

Questions at the end of chapter are hard to understand sometimes. Wording is a bit confusing.

This book starts out a little too simple but it quickly picks up pace to a more appropriate level. This is the only book I have ever read that makes assembly code easy to read. This entire book is actually easy to read.