The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture

the book is in good condition. my teacher has been using it as a required textbook for a few years. it covers various topics taught in computer architecture class in college.

I would give it a five star if it's a book from Wikibooks. Lots of overly detailed facts, historical information, mediocre but acceptable formatting, and excessive citations - everything you would expect from a community sourced textbook.But this is a published textbook with a price tag of over 200 dollars. And only minutes into reading the book, I got terribly frustrated. Some of the problems the book has, which I've discovered after reading the first chapter, are as follows:1. The book uses very low quality images. On Page 9, there is even a picture taken from Wikipedia! Being printed in black and white, it is near impossible to see what's actually on the picture. (It is a photo of a motherboard with blurry annotations that you cannot read). And on Page 27, there is a picture that seemed taken by a cellphone camera. What's bothering me is that the book actually uses professional illustrations as well. Why do they allow low quality images to be used when they have access to professional artists, who could easily draw a much better illustration than a low resolution photo.2. The typography of this book is rather bad. If they could use a smaller font size that most college-level textbooks would use, the near 900-page book would probably be only half as thick. The formatting is so minimal that you will have no idea if you are reading a new section or just a sub-section. Important concepts are not highlighted properly, while random words are put in bold for no apparent reasons.3. It seems that whoever wrote the exercise questions did not read the book at all. Questions are irrelevant to what's covered in the chapter, and sometimes require you to Google the answer - the book just mentions nothing about what the question's asking.4. Also it seems that whoever wrote the answers for the exercise questions did not read the questions at all. The answer to exercise 8 in Chapter 1 seems just plain wrong.However, it is a solid book - it holds my coffee mug without deformation, even after hours of use.

Ordered this book for a class. The book is almost triple of the price at the publisher's website (for the hardcover version). Got my book from one of the vendors here in Amazon. They happen to be from the UK and the version that they have is the "International version". In this case this is exactly the same version as the "North American" version so do not get confused by this and also is from the same publisher.The book itself is just an overview of computer organization and architecture so you won't be finding a more in-depth approach to this field that you would from other sources. Having said that, I think it is a great book for this level although some sections are more difficult to follow than others. Sometimes I feel that some of the topics assume that you have some background knowledge that is not necessarily implied so for some topics you may have to consult other sources in order to clarify or expand what is being discussed on the book. Regardless, I still consider that the book does a great job compiling and presenting the different aspects and concepts of this vast and complex field.

Overall, unclear textbooks; I would imagine there to be better alternatives. This textbook uses very little programming, and it's mostly conceptual.

Good condition

The book was very dry and bit of a bore to read.

A required text for one of my computer science classes. The topics built upon each other nicely. It described the concepts without the use of silly metaphors (Little Man, I'm looking at you!). The use of MARIE was nicely integrated.

This book is the honest-to-god worst. The text is so overly complicated and rambling that I have yet to make it through a single chapter without a massive headache. It reads like something that was written as a review for people already familiar with all of the concepts, as it spends lots of time on tangents and barely touches on concepts that seem to be considered universally important in CS. Even my professor flat out said that he thought it was useless, but it was chosen by the department head. Bottom line: if you need this book for a class, it would probably be a good idea to look online for lecture notes/slides on the topics or find some good YouTube videos (at least as supplements); if you're looking to learn about computer architecture on your own time, though, look somewhere else.

A thoroughly entertaining read. 10001 11000 11100

i like it, but i found a lot of typo and also some examples solved in a long hard way, not enough examples for chapter 2, u could easily get lost in the details, only very few exercises are answered at the end of the book