Computers

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Ron White has written an expanded of edition How Computers Work. The Millennium Edition offers readers a totally updated and refreshing view of computer technology that will take them into the next century. Readers are treated to new graphics, new insight into computer operations, new developments in the computer industry, and new technology to incorporate into their personal and business computing! This new edition of How Computers Work is a beautifully illustrated and designed book that clearly and concisely explains the overall operation of computers. Readers will learn how individual computer components work, how the Windows operating system and a number of software applications work, how various audio, graphics, and video technologies work, and how a number of essential peripheral accessories work. Readers will also pick up on some helpful information about the Y2K phenomenon. Readers are taken on a breath-taking journey through the operation of the bios, cache, chips, memory, ports, hard drives, CD’s, diskettes, zip drives, graphics boards, sound boards, modems, monitors, mouses, joysticks, printers, surge protectors, back-up power supplies, digital cameras, scanners, and much more. White includes discussion of cutting-edge Pentium technologies and how Web browsers, e-mail, networks, virtual reality, multimedia, and data compression work. This book is perfect for company employees, for students who may be using computers for the first time, and beginners starting out with just an interest in computers. This book is great for classroom use and will also make a fine gift for the first-time computer buyer! It is must reading for anyone wanting to learn more about the computing scene. The CD included with the book offers a cool multimedia interactive tour no one should miss out on!

Review by Graham Douglas Lincoln:

I work in the IT / Computer Repair industry, and I personally feel that this book is very helpful to most individuals, especially those who have little familiarity with computer systems, internal structures, gadgets and whatnots.
I found the detailed and heavily-illustrated sections regarding chipsets, processors, memory buffers, etc. to be very helpful. Most computer manuals are very technical and assume you know a computer inside and out, already (despite constant development in the industry and the fact that by the time a computer hits the shelves it is out-dated).
These “How Computers / Internet,” etc. books are wonderful manuals for those who just want to know “how the heck does this crazy thing work, anyway ?!?!”
You won’t be able to pass your A+ Certifications with this series of books, but you will understand much of the jargon people throw-around in the office, and you will see flow charts of “How Computers Work.”
I sincerely appreciated the diagrams of a Techtronix Printer!
Suffice to Say, if “a picture is worth a thousand words,” this book is pricesless for the novice and very helpful for the beginning (uncertified) Techs in the computer repair field. The usual Black & White Illustrations in computer manuals aren’t exactly condusive to really getting a feel for the stuff you might be yanking out and replacing. However, this book is full of numerous full-color, full-page illustrations.

Review by Tami Brady:

I remember how intimidating it was when I got my first computer. At the time, my husband regularly used a computer at work and thought that I should learn. Of course, I didn’t even know how to turn on the thing let alone make it do something worthwhile.

Looking back, I wish I would have had a resource like Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Computer Basics. The book starts right from the start. Right off, the book tells the reader that they aren’t likely to damage the computer by pressing the wrong button. It also explains all the components of a computer and then takes the reader step by step through what the computer can do. Since the book is based on Windows 7 technology, the new computer owner can simply unpack the parts and begin setting up. By the end of the book, the reader will pretty much be caught up on the basics.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Computer Basics is good for those new to computing. It provides the basics and does so in an easy to understand way. However, additional resources may need to be consulted if troubleshooting information is required.

Review by Daniel E. Valentine:

I have been repairing computers, tutoring adults and assisting with teaching children in a K-6 environment computers. When anybody asks me for help learning, I point this book out and start them off with it. It has all the basics you need to know. You can use it for quick reference and to learn how to get around on your computer. The book is WELL worth the money you spend on it. Now there is the 5th edition it is even better yet! The 5th edition has Windows 7 for persons buying new computers. There are 38 chapters and every chapter is fully understandable not packed with a bunch of “geek” terminology but simple easy to use format. We have purchased over 15 books to learn the basics.

Review by Sam:

I used computers a little at work, but on retiring wanted to tap into their usefulness for keeping me connected with folks and developing my interests. This book is just right–the author respects my intelligence and tells me just what I need to know to overcome my techphobia. There’s a section on working with software that gave me the basics of several useful types of programs. The Internet section not only gave me advice on how to maneuver around online but also some tips for staying safe that were much appreciate. All in all, I heartily recommend this book for those who want to get started with computers on the sunny side of 50!

Review by James R. Johnson:

I ordered computers for seniors and computers for absolute beginners. both are fine, but they still assume you know something about computers. I still want something that takes you from step one on up. both books are good, but they sometimes skip a step. I wanted something that assumes you have never touched a computer in your life.

Review by David A. Lessnau:

This is a tough book to review. On one hand, it’s got an amazing amount of information in it. On the other, it’s got a lot of editing problems. It also suffers from a lack of focus on who its audience is. So, splitting the difference, I’m rating this book at 4 stars out of 5.

Regarding the book’s audience, it’s vital that you pay attention to the chart on page xiii of the Preface. It maps your path through the book based on whether you’re a software-type or a hardware-type. Assuming I was so brilliant that I could ignore such trivia, I attempted to plow my way through the whole book. Software-type that I am, I had some tough times in a couple of sections and then utterly failed to understand anything when I hit the core of Chapter 5. If I had paid attention to that chart, I would have known to skip that part of the book. However, even for the material that’s within the path laid out for you by that chart, a lot of the work seems to assume knowledge on the part of the reader. For instance:

– Chapter 2 is about the MIPS assembly language. In the exercises, you’re supposed to write various code snippets. Many of these snippets assume far more familiarity with writing entire assembly programs than is presented.

– The exercises at the end of each chapter are broken into three types: regular, “For More Practice,” and “In More Depth.” Those last two types require far more knowledge than is presented. It looks like the authors culled them from previous editions and, instead of trashing them, just stuck them on the CD and referenced them.

– Exercise 3.9 is annotated as requiring Section 3.2. But, unless you’re very familiar with the implementation of MIPS assembly language, there’s no way that someone using the material in that section alone could do the problem.

– Exercise 3.13 is annotated as requiring Section 3.3. Yet, the question is completely undoable unless you’ve at least read Appendix B. Of course, Appendix B, itself, is practically indecipherable unless you’ve had previous experience/knowledge with Logic Design.

– Exercises 7.21, 7.22 and 7.38 talk about “the first 1 million references in a trace of gcc.” The book contains no definition of what that means. Those questions also mention the cache simulator “dinero” and say, “see the Preface of this book for information on how to obtain them.” There’s no such information in the Preface or on the CD. The CD does have MipsIt software which includes a cache simulator, but it doesn’t seem to work reliably on my XP SP2 system (it also doesn’t seem to accept those “traces” as input). That could be operator error, though. Doing a Google search pointed me to max.stanford.edu as a source of the software and traces. But, it seems you have to have a Linux system (or be smarter than me) to use them.

– Exercise 7.35 gives a C code snippet and asks you to calculate the expected cache miss rate. There’s nothing in the book about calculating expected miss rates from algorithms. Also, the exercise is assigned partially against section 7.4. Section 7.4 covers virtual memory, not caches.

– Most of the Chapter 8 exercises are mis-referenced (i.e., they’re labeled as being associated with certain sections of the chapter which have nothing to do with the question). Along with the standard problem of assuming knowledge that’s not covered in the book, many of them teach new information instead of testing/re-enforcing comprehension of the provided material.

There are many incorrect page number and section number references in the book. This is especially bad in the exercises where it becomes impossible to do certain ones since the code and data they’re referencing isn’t findable (at least easily). This problem does seem to get better as you get to the later chapters. There are also problems with basic typography. Some examples:

– Exercise 3.29 wants the reader to come up with a non-restoring division algorithm based on the restoring division algorithm in Figure 3.11 on page 185. The figure and page numbers are right, but the text of the question refers to “step 3b” and “restoring the Remainder” that aren’t present there. So, there’s no way to figure out what the authors are doing or what they want the reader to do in the exercise.

– Many of the tables and diagrams in the book use “color” to help indicate something important. Unfortunately, the color used is dark blue. Unless you look very carefully, there’s no difference between the regular text/line color (black) and the “emphasized” version.

– The text description of Figure 7.31 on page 544 mentions labeled sections that show differences in performance based on cache associativity. The labels are missing.

– Exercise 7.45 gives you a C snippet that you’re supposed to document. It contains “!!” as an operator. C has no such operator. My guess is it’s either a logical AND, “&&”, or a logical OR, “||”.

Also, the chapters are WAY too long and there are no exercises following the sections. For instance, Chapter 2 is 100 pages long over 20 sections. All the exercises (59 of them) are clumped together in the back of the chapter. The authors note the necessary section numbers with these exercises, but each section needs its own set of exercises immediately following it. This would also alleviate the problem where the authors have the wrong section numbers assigned to exercises. If these exercises were at the end of a section instead of clumped with 60 other exercises at the back of the chapter, they’d stand out more if they didn’t belong.

And, finally, the book needs answers to the questions.

As an aside, this book is used in Florida State University’s (FSU) CDA 3101: Computer Organization course.

Review by Ramon Kranzkuper:

This book is one of the standard textbooks for Computer Organization. However the approach of instruction taken by the authors is unconventional, and a reader might or might not find it useful. Here are the points that will be useful to prospective buyers: 1. If this book was ASSIGNED as a course requirement, have no fear. With a good instructor in class as your primary source, the book is fairly easy to understand. Besides, the exercises are well ranked in order of difficulty, and sufficiently varied across levels of difficulty. And they are usually interesting. 2. If you wish to use this as a reference work, be warned. The style is strange, and upside down in places. For example, “examples” are given with wrong usage of Assembly “instructions”, because the book has not “got there yet”. Later, you are given the “correct version”. Some people might like this, some may not. 3. If you are a professional and want a refresher, be warned again. The book labours through pages and pages of simple worked exercises, involving nothing more complicated than a times b divided by c, and then jumps into implementational details. 4. One thing the book must be praised for is its thoroughness. 5. Essentially, the authors have intended that ANYONE not even remotely familiar with the subject should be able to tackle it from the ground up. Thus you have concepts introduced in an EXTREMELY step by step fashion, and no one will complain that the book is “difficult to read”, per se. But the authors carry it a little too far, and those readers used to traditional textbook techniques of explanation, will be lost in many places. Those who have no problems with this might complain that the book is too long in places. The most satisfied reader will be one who has no idea of what computers are, and was thrown into this course all of a sudden, and who has a lot of free time, and who has an instructor to guide him through the book and the course.

Review by John Mashey:

Computer architecture has seen vast changes in the last 20 years, and fortunately, H&P somehow manage to do a new edition about every 5 years, often enough to stay current. When the First Edition appeared, it quickly became *the* standard textbook on the topic, to be replaced in that role by each successive edition.

Computer architectures complexify over time, and so do books. The Third Edition was about 1100 pages long. The Fourth has been shrunk back to something more manageable by moving subsidiary details to a CD included with the book.

This edition is well worth having, even if one already has the earlier ones. In particular, the additional material on multiprocessors is especially welcome, given that it has become much more difficult to speed up uniprocessors.

Most people who work in or near computer systems architecture know these books, but I have often recommended them to others, such as technology journalists, venture capitalists, and financial analysts, i.e., people who are rarely computer archtiects, but need to understand computer technology and its trends. Many such have been surprised to find the book was useful to them.

H&P write very clearly, and each chapter outlines its key concepts for a topic, then works down to detailed analyses, and then comes back up to summarize. hence, I’ve often recommended to people:

1) Read the first few sections of each chapter.

2) In each remaining section per chapter, read until the going gets heavy, then skip to the next section. In some cases, this will happen after reading the first paragraph, but don’t worry, the writing will return to a higher level.

3) Read “Concluding Remarks” and any “Fallacies and Pitfalls” or Historical Perspectives” sections at the end of a chapter.

Anyway, I expect this Edition will be just as indispensable as the earlier ones.

Review by J. C. Thibodaux:

I had this book for a graduate course in computer science, and after having been through it, I can say several parts of it are in major need of a rewrite. To be fair, a lot of the material was engaging, and even fun to read; but the layout was so awful that much of what they were saying couldn’t be understood by someone not already familiar with the subject without wading through the appendices. In their defense, it is the fourth edition of the book, and the technology has changed much since its inception, so the format is going to be a little messed up. This is also likewise a major strike against them in the area of the exercises: Many of them are very badly written, have little to no relation to what is actually taught in the text, and are fraught with obvious errors that should have been caught two editions ago. On a few of them, even our instructor (who is very knowledgeable) had to throw up his hands and declare that it was anyone’s guess.

All in all, this text has a lot good information and potential, but badly needs revision and restructuring if it’s to be a truly great learning tool.

Review by Digital Puer:

I’m a graduate student in Comp Sci, and I recently had the opportunity to take a networking class again just to refresh my basic knowledge (my dissertation topic isn’t related to networks). It was a pleasant surprise for me that the class utilised this textbook. I have been at the university level in CS for 8+ years (grad + undergrad), and this book is *by far* the best introductory computer science textbook I have ever read in any CS subject.The book is very well-written and extremely interesting to read. I was never bored in any chapter. Kurose and Ross are knowledgable experts in their field, and their exposition of the material is fantastic. Unlike Tanenbaum’s book, they start at the application layer and move down. IMHO, this is a far better pedagogical strategy, because young students these days already have an excellent layer-5 understanding thanks to daily interaction with HTTP, IM, P2P file sharing, etc. If I remember correctly from my undergrad days, my own experience in a bottom-up approach, starting at the physical layer, really put me to sleep and put me off from networking. That’s a shame, because networking is a really exciting field.The best parts of the book are the breadth, thorough use of real-world topics, and the illustrations. In fact, the diagrams and illustrations are just plain great. Most technical writers often rely too much on the written word. Here, the authors augment almost every pair of pages with an illustration; this is simply remarkable. The explanations of fundamental topics (such as packet-switching, DNS, TCP congestion control, IP routing, and ethernet) are *extremely* clear. More advanced topics are very up-to-date, covering cutting-edge subjects such as P2P, CDNs, security, NATs, 802.11, RTP, etc. I have not found a better introductory explanation of CDNs anywhere else. Although networking does have a lot of math in various areas, this introductory book does not get too much in detail in mathematical discourse, making this book very readable. That’s a fine approach in my opinion, as a deep mathematical analysis of various topics is best left for grad school or a professional job.The authors’ academic background really shows. Every topic is filled with citations/references to other work. This is great, because this book is just an introductory book with wide breadth but is otherwise lacking in significant depth. The interested reader (future grad student or network engineer?) can easily follow up on any topic he/she likes thanks to the exhaustive list of references.As if all of that were not enough, there is an accompanying website that has interactive Java applets demonstrating various topics as well as a set of Powerpoint slides for download. Furthermore, I enjoyed the interchapter dialogues with various famous researchers in the field.All in all, this is an outstanding book for the undergrad level, and I expect this would be a great book for professionals who want to have a firm grasp on networking fundamentals. I wish all my undergrad books were written as well as this one.

Review by PigRoasterDad:

Our course, Networking and Data Communications, was assigned to me in the eleventh hour. Though I have been teaching Computer Science for 22 years I had not taught this course before. I chose this book because it seemed to be well written and had good support materials but, as we all know, there is no guarantee that the students will agree. The course is over now and I just received the student evaluations of me, the text and the course. They were much better than I hoped for and I give the bulk of the credit to this textbook. Here are the three written comments from students regarding the book “Book was good, approach was beneficial.” “The book for this course [Kurose,2000] was excellent. I recommend keeping it.” “The book was very useful, but the website could use some work.”Students are also asked to rate the book on a scale from 1 (difficult to understand) to 5 (Clear and easy to read). The book was rated as follows by the 22 students in the class: 8 fives, 13 fours, 1 three, 1 two and no ones. As an instructor, I found the book to be well written and well edited. Rarely did I find errors in the text and most of those that I did find were typographical errors. I found the web site to be especially useful. The discussions by other readers pointed out things to watch out for and gave me an easy way to make general preparations well in advance. I had my students do the first three lab assignments. They especially liked the two application layer assignments and had a good bit of trouble with the transport layer assignment. I found the supplied code to be well organized and the parts that were left out for the students to complete challenged them (and me) in the right directions. The approach of focusing on Internet networking was an excellent choice for an introduction to networking. The choice to start at the application layer and move down to the physical layer is natural and understandable. It drives home the whole idea of layered architectures well and is a great example of the power of top-down approaches.I will follow the advice of the student that recommends we keep this text when I teach the course next year.As any reader of this might guess, I highly recommend this text and ancillary materials for an introductory course in networking. I congratulate the authors and all that helped them on this project for the fine work they did.

Review by Kelly Jackson:

This book was received in a timely manner, it was priced fairly, and it was received in good condition.

Review by Kristen Johnson:

The book was just as it was described. It was in really good condition and got here in a timely manner.

Review by M. Amundson:

We still haven’t received this book and we purchased it 5 weeks ago. Very disappointed.

Review by Jeneé:

I’m always content with direct Amazon purchases. The item always arrives within 7 days, even though they provide a large window. The book was in the condition stated and it was exactly the edition pictured. I need it for my computer business systems class.

Review by Darrin Nicholson:

The book is very detailed but easy to understand. It explained computer terminology, hardware, software, language, and more in such a way to make sense. The book is ideal for people with little undertanding of, or just beginning to use, computers and programs.

Review by Joshua Makela:

not particularly engaging. though the class i bought this for is review for me. a satisfactory, very basic computer essentials textbook.

Review by Subbaiah N. Venkata:

What a splendid book! I wish I had gone to CMU and take this course. This book is written by CMU professors after teaching Computer Systems course for few years. This book covers broad spectrum of topics from Operating Systems, Compilers, Computer Architecture, Assembly Level Programming, Kernel internals, Linkers, etc from a programmer’s perspective (as the title aptly says).

I am searching for words to describe the usefulness of this book. In my experience, I have had hard time learning some of the topics where Operating systems, Processor and Compilers intersect. For example, Linkers and Loaders, program disassembly using reverse-engineering, virtual memory in Kernel etc. After all the hard work, I found the right book which grinds all the famous books in different areas and gives the right juice for the real programmers to taste and digest.

Those famous books are:

[1] Computer Organization and Design Second Edition : The Hardware/Software Interface by David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy

[2] UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers by Uresh Vahalia

[3] Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love

[4] Linkers and Loaders by John R. Levine

[5] GNU Binutils (GAS, objdump, ar, nm etc) Documentation

Excellent job. I really appreciate the work and content of this book.

Review by goldenv:

Have it on my desk since I bought for my computer architecture course (Csci 2021, Univ. of Minnesota – Twin Cities). Such a cool book to learn how computer hardware and software *really* work together, and why finding that out, could make us a more valuable computer scientist/programmer. Also provides a great hand to get you ready for advanced classes like Operating Systems, Compilers. My favorite chapter in the book is about Caches. It’s unbelievable to first find out how much cached really matter! Thanks Prof. Bryant and O’Hallaron. I think the first 7 chapters are what the most important to understand and grasp. Rest of the chapters are important too but they usually will overlap with other topics/classes like operating systems. Also, chapter 4 goes in more detail in processor architecure like pipelined CPU and will probably help more to the computer engineer; although computer scientists do learn a lot out of it and will help write code to exploit modern pipelined CPU’s, like the deeply pipelined, Pentium 4. But I think the first 7 chapters are the ones, that sets this book aside from the others. You will need access to LINUX, as most of the discussions rotate around it like the virtual address space, assembly code – GAS and so on use the linux implementations.After reading, you will be able tp convert decimal nos to binary and even floating point nos to binary format very easily. You will also learn more about twos complement operations and integer and floating point arithmetic, able to understand assembly code (GAS: GNU Assembler code), how procedures are implemented using stacks array allocation, debugging, embedding assembly code in C programs, more about CPU instruction sets and hardware control language and their implementations, pipelining, optimizing programs and expoliting caches, understanding modern CPU’s, various storage technologies, linking, symbol tables, object files, shared object files, and more.Don’t forget to visit the book’s website before buying the book. It is Here is a brief look about what it is all about!
Chapter 1: A Tour of Computer Systems
Chapter 2: Representing and Manipulating Information
Chapter 3: Machine-Level Representation of Programs
Chapter 4: Processor Architecture [MORE FOR COMPUTER ENGINEERS!]
Chapter 5: Optimizing Program Performance
Chapter 6: The Memory Hierarchy [COOL ONE!]
Chapter 7: Linking
Chapter 8: Exceptional Control Flow
Chapter 9: Measuring Program Execution Time
Chapter 10: Virtual Memory
Chapter 11: System-Level I/O
Chapter 12: Network Programming
Chapter 13: Concurrent Programming