Rating: 
Summary: very comprehensible book
Review: I have used many other computer books about computer architecture. I must say that in a university, most text are very hard to understand. Compared with this text, I find this text is very comprehensible. If u are able to read this book, you will be able to understand any idea about computer. Every aspects of computer are covered. If I am a professor, I will feel ashamed of using this book because it is too easy. I must admit that I have taken digital design before computer architecture. I will tell you that I understand what I learned in digital design until I read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good overview of computer architecture
Review: I must say that this book is great for a self learner interested on the underlying technology in modern computers. Love the layout using layers for the explanation of computer architecture. A must read even for application programmers.
Rating:
Summary: Good overview of computer architecture
Review: I must say that this book is great for a self learner interested on the underlying technology in modern computers. Love the layout using layers for the explanation of computer architecture. A must read even for application programmers.
Rating:
Summary: Book is fine
Review: Ignore the other reviewers comments who are lazy and/or incapable of doing the end-chapter problems, it's amusing how many people repeated that(like parrots).
Some problems take more time and require compact understanding of concepts explained so far and some are easy, I used the book for an independent study course and it's readable, presenting a good deal of material, and includes quite funny comments in the text. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book - very clear explainations yet detailed
Review: In my four years in studying Computer Engineering, this has been by far the best of my text books. Unlike most other books, it is very well written, and much easier to understand. If you have a decent knowledge of computers and boolean logic, this book will be extremely valuable. I'm not sure where the other reviewers are coming from, their negative reviews are almost completely wrong. The examples are challenging and helpful. I stongly suggest this book for anyone studying in the computer engineering field, it is well worth its price.
Rating:
Summary: A computer science must-have
Review: One of the most important skills of a programmer is the ability to envision what goes on at different levels of abstraction. Depending on your programming task, it may be a few levels or all the way down to the machine level if you are writing compilers. This book helps provide an excellent frame of reference for real-world programming and lets you visualize the computer as a set of levels with their individual boundaries.
The book is particularly useful for programmers working in the area of virtual machines, since it uses the picoJava(tm) architecture as case study throught the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good as a starting point
Review: Prof. Tanenbaum's writing style is a blessing for people who are new to computer science. I would recommend this book to anyone with a non-electrical engineering/computer science background. For people with such a background, this is a good starting point for studying computer organization.
Rating: 
Summary: IJVM?
Review: Some parts of the book are not very bad, and easy to read. Other parts... like the part about the registers and the microarchitecture level, are totally incomprehensible. The IJVM software that belongs to the book... It gave me many headaches so far, and by carefully tracking down the errors I have come to the conclusion that it is not bug-free. Can anyone else confirm this?Indeed, the book contains in certain parts many typos (and more grave errors). I also do not see how a beginner would understand much of it.... But let's be honest... some parts are well written, and the comparisons between the different types of systems is a good way to clarify some differences.
Rating:
Summary: Apparently a great book for "great" minds
Review: Tenebaum apparently is a very smart guy, maybe that's why he was so not on the level of the students (like me) who had to read this book in my undergraduate course. It annoying when you read a chapter twice, and you are still like "what is this guy talking about?" Then in trying to answer some questions at the end of the chapter, you discover that nothing in the chapter adequately prepared you for the question. The beginning chapters were actually okay, like the layer descriptions, floating point numbers, circuits/gates, multiplexers. The problem is when he's done giving a fine inroduction to a topic, he delves into stuff which I must say makes no sense. The parts on parity bits and bits in general was crazy. Though I grasped some concepts, I did a lot of feeling in the dark. If you're using this in a class, hopefully you have a professor that'll do a good job of breaking down the material. Else, invest in another book. NOTE: i find it suspect that the ratings range from 1-5. I've thot about it and made my own conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Good intentions, bad execution
Review: The authors probably started out with good intentions and in a haphazard way, they probably make sense. However, this book was used in my school on complete beginners - students who werent supposed to know anything about computers. It was a total disaster. The following couple of things are wrong: a) the English is bad. Sometimes the text seems like a deliberate attempt to mislead. b) the questions at the back are obscure at best. They are frustratingly difficult to answer and what is really unfair is that they often do not get answered in the text. That I think, is really unfair in a book meant to be taught from at school. c) the topics are arranged well, but inside, they totally loose meaning. The subject being discussed seems dismembered and thrown randomly through out the book. In all, I and most of my class (none of whom had a kind word to say about the book) felt that thanks to the eccentricities of language, questions and arrangement of topics, it was entirely probable that the reader actually form a wrong idea and understanding of the processes being described in the book. You really need a good teacher who can pick and choose his/her way to be able to get through this book and have hthe students actually form an accurate understanding of the subject.
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