Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture

I recently used this book for a course and agree with the reviews that it is easy to read and very concise. It provides a wide scope of computer architectures and covers these well. However, I did find it frustrating at times that it provided too cursory a coverage of the computer organization pertaining to memory. This was especially prevalent in its discussion of caching and virtual addressing. It did not provide enough technical discussion or indepth examples although the illustrations were excellent.

Great book for students and entry-level engineers. The authors explain complex concepts in intuitive approaches which make it very easy to understand

I used this book for a course in Computer Architecture. Except for one chapter, I read the entire book and I practiced almost all the exercises. As a novice reader, I liked the book very much. The book is very well organized, chapters are laid out in logical sequence and the writing style is very clear. Many illustrations are presented in the book that make it easy to understand concepts. Many examples are presented in special cases that help the student understand complicated stuff. Overall I am very much pleased with this book. The only reason I give it four stars instead of five is because the answers to the exercises listed at the back of the book had errors in them (I confirmed this fact after checking with my instructor) and these are not fixed even in the last edition. Highly recommended to those who are new to this topic.

I can't say I have read this book cover to cover, but I did examine each chapter and its contents for at least a couple of hours. I am a computer science instructor at a start up university.First the pros - I will say this book is very well organized in terms of each chapter covering specific aspects about computer science. It gives a good "big picture" view of computer hardware and how it interacts with networking and operating system concepts. If this is what you are looking for, this book is a good one.Cons - However, I was hoping to find a book that goes beyond digital logic and explaining the architecture within .. bus architectures, how ALU and microprogramming work and so on (i.e., to the level of detail done by the Patterson and Hennessy computer org book - but I don't find their book very organized). This book does have a chapter on this but the material was covered very cursorily. What I found was that this book seems to cover almost half of computer science - down to operating system concepts of memory management and disk access and even data structures and computer networks. I would say that MORE than half of this book is already taught in other subjects that most computer science students generally take. I would see no need (as an instructor) to repeat most of its content to computer science students. However, if I were to target non-computer science students (say .. EE majors looking for an understanding of the hardware-software-network interface within one course), then this would be a good book.I assign it 3 stars only because it does not suit my purpose as prescribing it as a textbook and what I believe this book should deliver in accordance with its title. However, it is a well written book that many could find very useful.