The Mips Programmer's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Good book for computer science students!
Review: This book offers an overview of the assembler language, designed for the family of mips processors r2000 and r3000 (nothing about r4000 and r6000 series). It also shows common C-functions translated in assembler. It explains, in general guidelines, the internal architecture of the r2000 processor thus not as deep as D. Patterson's books.

Beyond this, the text is a bit confused, the chapters don't lead the reader to any meaningful point, offering pieces of explanations thought for an already instructed reader. In fact a beginner won't find here a good introduction to the subject. E.g. at the very beginning, when the author deals with the structure of the registers (with many long, meaningless words without any explanation), does anybody know what a 'C0_BADVA' is? After that it goes along, is a single page, to the stack and the initialization of the eproms.

If, on the other side, the reader already knows the subject, this book is a good and useful giude when he needs source codes and hits for his code writing. If someone wonders where a mips processor can be found... Uhm.. In a Playstation or in a handheld.

Well this text is particulary suitable for courses dealing with computer science. Last but not least the price. In my humble opinion si quite hight for a 350 page-long book.