See MIPS Run

Rating:
Summary: this is the MIPS Bible
Review: Excellent book for MIPS. Read this first then
use the official documents from MIPS or your
MIPS cpu vendor. If you are an embedded programmer
learning MIPS or bringing up a MIPS system this
is your bible. The code snippets are extremely
useful also.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not practical
Review: I like the content. I hardly can use the book as a reference because it is missing a convenient section with mnemonics and their effects like you can find on other programming manual (I love the PowerPC one from IBM.) The succint part where the mnemonics are given is too small and not complete. Therefore I have to rely on some other manuals to understand precisely the output of the processor functions on its various registers. The book gives a good insight at MIPS architecture including VM and examples and pretty much everything is covered here. I wish the examples would have an extra column with the hexa values of there instructions counterpart to give some info on the way instructions are built.

Rating:
Summary: Good steamcourse and reference
Review: If you are looking for a book which gets you up and running with MIPS then look no further. This book explains its history and everything you need to know to start `messing around' with the MIPS RISC CPU.
The author also provides a lot of `gotchas', which he learned from prior experience from developing on/with the MIPS CPUs. Valuable insight in those little things which will ease your life as a developer.
Aside from the info provided by the author on the MIPS CPU itself, it also explains a great deal about basic processor technical knowledge, thus making the book a breeze to read for those of us with no extended experience in CPU internals.
Like one of the other reviewers said though, for a real reference with regard to the mnemonics and other instruction related things you might want to get the PDF files from the mips.com site and use those next to your See MIPS Run book.
They supplement each other well.

Rating:
Summary: A great book with lots of detail.
Review: The best book on programming a MIPs processor I have ever encountered. Lots of good tidbits and stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Get this book!
Review: This is an outstanding book that is written by an author who knows his stuff. It covers a lot more material than just the MIPS architecture, although if that's what you're looking for, it's THE best MIPS book, and I have them all.

Sweetman THANKFULLY covers many topics that aren't unique to MIPS, such as pipelines, caches, memory management units, floating-point processing, etc... in addition to going into great detail specific to the MIPS variants.

The sign of a very good engineer/author/technical writer is someone who takes something that is complicated and involved, and makes it easy to understand. Sweetman is such an author.

On top of all that, the book makes for enjoyable reading and has a very conversational/friendly tone (but don't get me wrong, it is quite in-depth and technical.)

If you're working on any RISC architecture, including other variants such as PowerPC or ARM, this book is for you.