Rating: 
Summary: AWFUL QUESTIONS!!
Review: This is one of the worst textbooks I have ever read. The only reason I bought it was due to my C.S. class. However, I quickly learned to hate it. While I can understand the chapters, the questions are overly difficult and have nothing to do with real-world applications. There is no way to apply your knowledge or find out if you are inperpreting the text right.Even with programming knowledge, this book was still hard to work with. You can do better than this one. I'll be pawning this book...
Rating:
Summary: AWFUL QUESTIONS!!
Review: This is one of the worst textbooks I have ever read. The only reason I bought it was due to my C.S. class. However, I quickly learned to hate it. While I can understand the chapters, the questions are overly difficult and have nothing to do with real-world applications. There is no way to apply your knowledge or find out if you are inperpreting the text right. Even with programming knowledge, this book was still hard to work with. You can do better than this one. I'll be pawning this book...
Rating: 
Summary: The best in the business
Review: This is the best book on computer architecture without doubt. I am really astonished to think how much Prof Tanenbaum knows! The language is lucid, the illustrations very good, and the flow is simply wonderful. Without doubt, anybody wanting to know how a computer works must read this book. It is helpful to any student, IT professional, or for anybody who simply wants to know more about computers.
Rating:
Summary: Giving me a headache
Review: This man tries to describe the structure of a computer but does so in such an unstructured manner.
This book seems to be written in an informal manner but using so much formal and technical words. I know it says its an "INTRODUCTION"(whatever that means him) but anybody that tells you that you can learn about something soooooooooo complicated like the architecture of a computer in about 650 pages is a liar.
Im not really sure if this book is meant to be directed at an audience with proficient knowledge in computer architecture who wants to refresh his/her memory, a beginner or someone who likes crytography.
If you want to learn about a computer, then i suggest you buy books specific to every level of a computer organization.
Thats right, this book basically only is good for one thing. Telling you to "GO AND READ 6 BOOKS".
Rating: 
Summary: Disconnected
Review: This text provides a good reinforcement to computer architecture for someone who has had a brief experience with the subject. I am disappointed that such an interesting subject is not as well developed in this book as I had hoped. The topics seem disconnected and the questions at the end of the chapter do not seem to properly represent the material in the chapter. Although the author's sprinkled humor is quite refreshing this book fell short of my expectations.
Rating: 
Summary: OK Book, Impossible at times
Review: This textbook is used as the mandatory textbook for the computer organization course I just completed. I had no prior exposure to computer hardware or digitil circuits before I took the course. Since the course covered only chapters up to chapter 4, parts 5.1 to 5.4 and 7.1 to 7.3, my comments reflect only these parts of the book. Overall, I found that the discussions to be too vague that the book would not serve as a self teaching text. The material is meant to be concise but often ends up vague. The material would follow logically but when attempting to answer a problem, I found my understanding to be incomplete. There are many cases where the concepts are not followed by a concrete example so that I end up not being able to test the concept. The questions at the end of the chapters often refer to some of these concepts but there is no way to confirm whether the concepts were understood because there are no answers to these questions in the book. Two parts of the book require special mention. I thought the material on digital logic circuits was insufficient and although the idea was to provide only sufficient concepts to understand the rest of the chapter, I had to go to another source to advance my understanding of these concepts. I thought the explanations in section 4.5 on improving pipeline performance were poor. The reader would have to make too many extrapolatons to be able to understand the direct and associative types of cache to be able to derive the bit size of the tag, set, and word given the necessary block and cache size information. I had to reference the Hamacher book to understand the issues related to branch prediction. I don't understand why the author included the second paragraph on page 275 as the explanation was so incomplete to convey any useful information. Why not just refer to the referenced document? There are a few significant errors in the text. The author does not have an errata for the text. I don't know why so many readers gave this book high ratings. If this text is to used as an introductory text, the quality of the explanations for this level of readers does not merit the high rating.
Rating:
Summary: Not for the self learner
Review: This textbook is used as the mandatory textbook for the computer organization course I just completed. I had no prior exposure to computer hardware or digitil circuits before I took the course. Since the course covered only chapters up to chapter 4, parts 5.1 to 5.4 and 7.1 to 7.3, my comments reflect only these parts of the book. Overall, I found that the discussions to be too vague that the book would not serve as a self teaching text. The material is meant to be concise but often ends up vague. The material would follow logically but when attempting to answer a problem, I found my understanding to be incomplete. There are many cases where the concepts are not followed by a concrete example so that I end up not being able to test the concept. The questions at the end of the chapters often refer to some of these concepts but there is no way to confirm whether the concepts were understood because there are no answers to these questions in the book. Two parts of the book require special mention. I thought the material on digital logic circuits was insufficient and although the idea was to provide only sufficient concepts to understand the rest of the chapter, I had to go to another source to advance my understanding of these concepts. I thought the explanations in section 4.5 on improving pipeline performance were poor. The reader would have to make too many extrapolatons to be able to understand the direct and associative types of cache to be able to derive the bit size of the tag, set, and word given the necessary block and cache size information. I had to reference the Hamacher book to understand the issues related to branch prediction. I don't understand why the author included the second paragraph on page 275 as the explanation was so incomplete to convey any useful information. Why not just refer to the referenced document? There are a few significant errors in the text. The author does not have an errata for the text. I don't know why so many readers gave this book high ratings. If this text is to used as an introductory text, the quality of the explanations for this level of readers does not merit the high rating.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good introduction to the inner workings of a computer
Review: This well-written and often humorous (in the good sense) book is targeted for a freshman or sophomore in computer science or computer engineering. Following a few introductory chapters which give both a historical, conceptual, and structural overview of the computer, Tanenbaum partakes upon a semi-detailed introduction to the various "levels" of a computer, beginning with the digital-logic level (the actual hardware) and working up to both the operating-systems and assembly-language levels. With respect to the digital-logic level, I thought he did well in introducing the student to the essential components (e.g. registers, ALU, Flip-Flops) without overburdening the student with design techniques such as Karnaugh maps, finite-state machines, etc.. However, by far the best part of the book seemed to be his explanation of the microarchitectural level, in which the relationship between memory, control, and datapath was fully explained. This chapter seemed to be where the "rubber met the road" in terms of showing the connection between programs and hardware. I would have preferred however if he had not introduced the IJVM language so early in this chapter, and had spent more time demonstrating microprograms. I know for a fact that many of my students seemed very confused about the difference between microinstructions and machine instructions.
Moreover, a majority of them found microprogramming with the Mic-1 very difficult if not impossible. More microprogram examples would probably have helped. Finally, where as the later chapters on instruction sets and assembly language seemed very adequate introductory overviews, the operating-systems level seemed overly broad and of not much use. Certainly, a student should read his other book on OS to fully appreciate this all-too-important aspect of the computer. In closing, I should mention that the Mic1 software also accompanies this text, and helps provide the student with a well-rounded education, in that they get some hands-on experience. The software and the well-written text make it an irresistable choice to use a first course in computer organization.
Rating:
Summary: perfect book
Review: We use this as a textbook for our Microarchitecture courses. It assumes almost no backgorund, it's clear, precise, and to the point. Compared to most other CS books that goes over CO, this book has A LOT.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: What else can I say. When I opened the very first page, I was overwhelmed! The book is VERY technical and in-depth and covers in GREAT detail all of the aspects of system architecture. My main gripe with this book is the following: At the end of each chapter are review questions. To find the answers to the majority of these questions within the text was nearly impossible. The book was required and that is why I purchased it. There are some books that you keep and some that you try to pawn off...this book will be sold!
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