Computer Science Books

When Tamsyn, Josh and Rob come across a sinister e-mail on the internet, they have no idea they will get caught up in a plot to blackmail an international theme park corporation. As they set off for summer vacations around the world, Josh and the others hope the warning is a hoax. But when more e-mails arrive, it seems "Icarus" is deadly serious. Their worst fears are confirmed when a one of them witnesses an explosion on the famous "Meteor" ride. With time running out and lives in danger, It is up to the Internet detectives in England, New York, Toronto and Perth to discover the identity of the blackmailer before some one gets hurt.

This was the fifth title in the eight book Internet Detective series. These are interesting, fast-paced books that are great for introducing kids to computers. I would recommend "System Crash" to eight to twelve year olds. If you enjoyed this, I would suggest reading the other Internet Detective books, especially #2 Escape Key, and #7 Virus Attack, which I think to be the best of the ID books.

"Net Bandits" is the first in the 8 book Internet Detective series about kids around the globe teaming up to solve mysteries via the World Wide Web. After reading this several years ago, I became interested in the internet and went on to purchase the remaining seven ID books.

What Happens? This books main purpose is to set the scene for further books, introduce and connect the characters, etc. Josh and Tamsyn are pupils at the Abbey School with different views on the internet. When Tamsyn begins receiving e-mails from the mysterious Z-Master, it is the beginning of what will become a desperate race against time to discover his identity. With the help of kids in New York, Perth and Toronto, Tamsyn and Josh attempt to decipher a cryptic e-mail that will lead them to a boy in danger...

"Net Bandits" is an action-packed fast-paced adventure and great for the purpose of introducing and encouraging children to use the Internet. I would recommend it to children aged from about eight to twelve.

If you enjoyed this, I would suggest reading the other Internet Detective books, especially #2 Escape Key, and #7 Virus Attack, which I think to be the best of the ID books.

I bought this book on a lark for my 9 year old daughter. She burned through it in 3 nights( a big deal for a 9yearold) and she loved it. Besides an engaing story I found my daughter had learned many internet concepts as well as emoticons. The :) and ;) symbols you see all over emails. She just shot through book 2 and asks everyday for book 3(which is currently outta stocK) :(

¬

Neat! So that means 'not'. =) or is it :-) hehe... this is really great, and I already have two books in my collection of the series. I think it's neat how the author was able to put the picture of the computer screen into the story to make it seem real.

This book was the first Internet Detectives book I read , and now I purchased the whole series. One of the best books I ever read. A defenite winner for all internet fans!

I had the pleasure of not only using this text for my neural network design graduate course, but also taking the course from one of the authors (Professor Howard Demuth).

This book is extremely well written. Being a PhD student in computer engineering, I have read many math books and advanced engineering books. Most of these books are informative, but difficult to read. Much of this is understandable because the topics are complex and explaining them in a very simple manner requires significantly more time. More diagrams, more examples, rewriting paragraphs to improve clarity, etc. This book tackles all of those issues perfectly!

Right now I am reading one of the other "classic" math texts and while I am already familiar with the topic, the reading is extremely difficult. Due to this, I recalled how easy it was to understand the neural network design text and wished my current author wrote more like them.

If you are interested in machine learning, in particular, neural networks, this is a superb book to get you started. Even the most complex mathematical topics in linear algebra and network design are explained so almost anyone can understand. Even if you do not have a strong mathematical background, you'll be able to understand almost all of the math.

Excellent book - (5/5 stars)!

I knew the very poor Matlab Neural Network Toolbox User's Guide by the same authors and I was kind of expecting the same, and boy was I wrong!

This book is simply brilliant, a miracle of pedagogy. It is intended for undergrad classes, but it is so clear that graduate students will benefit enormously from reading it before any other material. Plainly put, this book makes you UNDERSTAND this difficult topic, more than any other book that I know of (Zurada, Smith, Hassoun, Haykin, Duda-Hart, Caudill, etc)

A selection of worked out problems are included at the end of each chapter, a practice that is highly beneficial but alas too rare in books of the kind.

I very much appreciated the very clear exposition of backpropagation, and optimization methods such as Levenberg-Marquardt.

A note to Matlab users: funky demos are available for free and illustrate the main points of the book.

I purchased this book while looking for an appropriate textbook for use in my class on neural networks. This book is excellent for both beginners and experts. It is a rare book in that it demonstrates complex mathematical manipulations and principles (that are difficult to grasp and visualize - and explain) using examples. The review on mathematical principles is very useful. The book makes it easier to teach the subject now. Given the way everything is presented, this book will also help those that want to code their own networks. I recommend this book to everyone.

Very useful book to have if you plan to use NN (specially in matlab environment). The theory is very well covered and explained, along with graphical examples. The book lacks however, more insight into how to implemen NN in real world problems (for that, I would suggest seeing Fundamentals of NN by Laurene V. Fausett).

I have been studying neural network design for almost 30 years now and I have never found a more enchanting text book than this one. From day one I could not put it down. In fact, I bought a copy for each member of my extended family. Beale is brilliant in the way he demostrates the design and capability of neural network systems. No one has ever captured the public's imagination and heart the way he does in this compelling work. He has taken the study of neural networks to the next level. Hence, the world will be a better place. H2BurBabes4Ever.

All the information you need in one place to quickly and efficently secure your networks and computers . Easy to read and understand but yet very technical in nature. Highly recommended for all levels of users from students to professionals.

This is a very comprehensive Internet security book that details the nuts and bolts of the problems and solutions in elbow-deep detail. It also addresses specific causes of the issues we face; from government interventions and plans to terrorism and crime motivations. Great book, I highly recommend it.

Internet security is critical to most modern organizations--which have systems links across enterprisewide networks and VPNs, as well as exposure to customers, competitors, browsers, and hackers. This practical guide to Internet security provides the means for such organizations to effectively protect their sites from internal and external threats. It provides real-life scenarios and examples, as well as hands-on instruction for securing Internet communications.

So many Internet security books focus on theory and concepts but miss the practical aspects of security. This book gives it all to you, theory, concepts and practical steps you can take to deal with Internet security. I highly recommend it.

John Vacca has done it again. He has not only made a complex technology easy to understand, he also identifies the pitfalls and solutions that one has to be aware of in order to survive in this ever increasing world of network hacking, terrorism and identify theft. The book is extremely well organized and very consistent in the way it describes the various Internet and Intranet technologies, and the security issues and solutions associated with them. This book is a must for operating system and network managers, as well as information technology specialists that must develop and maintain distributed data management applications that operate in secure environments.

... a horrible Prolog tutorial.

This is not a good first book on Prolog. If you are new to Prolog and Logic Programming, you should read 'Art of Prolog' first.

Prolog is quite different from other languages, and you'll need some time to get it. This book doesn't give you that time: after briefly introducing the basic concepts, Bratko dives at breakneck speed into recursion and list processing.

Don't get me wrong, this is a magnificent book on how to do AI with Prolog, but it shouldn't be your first Prolog book. It's an excellent second book.

I remember contacting with Mr.Bratko via mail as I was a university student and I couldn't beleive that this book came from such a modest personality.
The most challanging language, the most challenging programming book I have ever faced with.
Force your IQ with this one.

I find the book does not adequetly explain the more complex code examples. First of all the code is not adequetly commented. Secondly, it does not explain the code well for programmers. First when introducing a program like in the expert systems shell chapter it should first define an interface for the program, and explain each goal listed. It should adequetly explain what each goal and clause should hope to achieve. Also, for the more complicated programs it should draw some type of diagram, maybe a flow chart or something that explains the concepts involved. It leaves too much figuring out and guessing for the reader. It is not very user-friendly!
On the positive side, it does an adequate job of explaining concepts when complex code is not involved. I found that I could follow along on even the more advanced chapters mostly everything at least until code was suddenly introduced. Then it became a guessing game as to what it was trying to do.
The author does not seem to realize that it is more difficult to try to understand somebody else's program than it is to write your own program from scratch. As a consequence the reader wastes a lot of time trying to guess what his program is doing.
Note: this review is of the 2nd edition and does not necessarily reflect the 3rd. But, then again, every other review on this page prior to mine is about the 2nd edition as well!

Professor Bratko has done a tremendous job of putting all the fundamental concepts of Prolog and its applications in various areas of AI. Although this book is focused on Prolog, the concepts that he has discussed are so fundamental that they can be implemented in other languages like Java as well.

I recommend this book to everyone who wants to learn Prolog. I would also recommend the readers to use a Prolog system to work out the examples and exercises as s/he goes through every chapter. A DEC10 Prolog system (like SICStus Prolog) would probably be the best companion for this book.

Although this text is always mentioned in the same breath as other introductory textbooks on prolog, I don't think I've ever seen it described as "the best."
The book which usually takes the palm in such comparisons is "Art of Prolog." While "Art of Prolog" is an outstanding book, I think that now, in 2006, it has been eclipsed by the 3rd edition Bratko's book. Why?

Simply this: Bratko's textbook is (as far as I'm aware) the _only_ textbook on prolog which treats the language as a living, developing language! Other textbooks are great for their time, but they are unfortunately stuck in their time. Its as if nothing has happend to the prolog language since February 16, 1987. But this isn't true at all!

The biggest case in point: constraint logic programming! Bratko's text is the only introductory prolog textbook to even acknowledge the existance of CLP. And Bratko gives very lucid descriptions of it, along with very helpful examples and challenging exercises.

Another case in point: inductive logic programming! An entire new branch of machine learning theory has risen, based on logic programming, and NONE of the other introductory prolog textbooks cover it? Come on guys!

I would love to see a 4th edition of this book, because since this one has been published, logic programming has moved even further ahead. Constraint handling rules (CHR), logical functional languages (like Curry), using prolog for the semantic web, etc etc etc. It might be the best kept secret in computer science, but logic programming is really still one of the most exciting areas of programming, and Bratko's book does the best job of staying abreast of, and conveying the excitment of, this living and dynamic field.

Robert Lafore Once again writing an outstanding book.It is a compulsory for any C++ developer.

This book is a definate must for the new C++ student. Easy to read and many examples with precise explanation of the example codes. Great book and a definate must have.

Robert Lafore's OOP in C++ is an excellent book.I read it from cover to cover.I also did all the examples in the book.I got so used to this book that once I lost it,I could not satisfy my doubts in C++ with any other book.Lafore deeply explains the complexities of this language in a simple easy way.Great for beginners also.Although,I read many other books on this subject,no other book explains things so vividly and clearly as in this.

I stumbled onto this book in 8th grade at a local Bookstar bookstore back in 1992. After thumbing through a few pages, I found that I could understand it pretty easily.

It was an amazingly well-written book. As a 14-year old kid I was able to write some pretty fancy object-oriented programs. Later in college, I found myself using Mr. Lafore's book more often than I used my C++ text by Stroustrup.

At some point while moving back and forth between school and home, I lost my copy. But I found that this book is STILL available in what is essentially its 4th edition under the title "Object-Oriented Programming in C++" to this day. Long live this book! It's wonderful!

I rarely give 5 stars to anything. This book is in the top 2 or 3 computer books I've ever read. The author uses a +5 pronged approach to teach. Most books don't even use 3! He explains the general concept very well, then provides relevent small examples, questions (with answers) at the end of chapters, then a magna cum example in a separate chapter, and what's more he uses diagrams very generously.
I agree with the other reviewers - FANTASTIC!
If anyone knows of a better beginner-intermediate C++ book, please send me an e-mail, titled "BETTER C++".

This is a book that everyone interested in wireless technologies must read. It clearly explains the major concepts, provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation together with useful practical advice. Even though I had been familiar with the concepts I enjoyed reading it and recommend it to anyone seriously interested in mobility.

This book is all you need to know about the wireless Internet, covering everything from radio signaling to devices and applications.

Rhoton has a talent for explaining complex topics at about the right level - the discussion is easy to understand, but not too elementary. If you have something to do with wireless data, I recommend you read this book.

It covers almost all of the bases that I can think of and many that I never would. I love the applications that the author uses. After spending over [money] on other wireless books, I finally found the one that actually taught me something. What's great about this book (unlike the others) is that it doesn't assume you have any background. The explanations are extremely descriptive, so you know what's going on. I'm not a total tech person, so there were a couple of chapters I had to read a couple times just to make sure I got it, but overall, this has to be the best wireless book I've ever seen!

What I loved most:

1) It's written in English, not "geek".

2) It's practical.

3) You don't need a crane to pick it up. ;-)

The Wireless Internet Explained is well worth the money. Mr. Rhoton has made an invaluable contribution to the new economy with a very readable book that explains, in very plain English, all aspects of wireless technologies. The book flows smoothly enough for you to read it at the beach, but it contains so much critical information that you should bring it back to your office. The most compelling parts point out the differences between mobile applications and their traditional counterparts.

A good book, clearly written with a lot of useful figures.
Even if there is no issue treated in depth, the 250 pages cover almost every important technology in the wireless arena.
You can use it as a starting point to know about standards, acronyms and all the related wireless technologies.
At the end of each chapter, Bibliography and Related Web Sites are presented to allow you complement the issues explained in the chapter.
Chapter 6 is my favorite. It introduces, in a very organized way, the wireless security theme. The chapter is full of illustrative figures, and almost every relevant area is covered.
Additionally, there are several useful comparative charts, and various taxonomies are used to structure the book.
Finally, a special mention to the coverage of smartcards, a lot more comprehensive than the ones found in similar books.

'Advanced Excel for Scientific Data Analysis' is one of those niche books that is absolutely the standard in the field. Warning/fact #1 is that this books is NOT NOT NOT for the every day regular Excel user. Repeat, this book is NOT for you. Jam-packed full of mathematical equations without a high amount of screen shots, this book is for mathematicians, physicists, econometrics people, statisticians or anyone that needs to go way way past the normal 'AVG' and 'SUM' functions found in Microsoft Excel. This is not light reading and its about as pinpointed to a specific audience as can be.

If you are a power Excel user go buy this book immediately and you will learn how to release its power better than ever before!!

***** HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION

Do you need a spreadsheet tool to analyze experimental data? If you do, then this book is for you! Author Robert De Levie, has written an outstanding book on advanced Excel that shows you how to conduct the numerical analysis of experimental data, such as are usually encountered in the physical sciences.

De Levie, begins by describing some of the standard mathematical methods, such as numerical integration and differentiation, and how to perform these most accurately on the spreadsheet. Then, the author examines precision--with random fluctuations and their reduction or removal. Next, he shows you how to apply the least squares methods to polynomials in the independent variable x, and to multivariable functions. The author continues by describing the nonlinear least squares method, where one compares a given data set with a model expression that depends on one or more numerical parameters.
In addition, he also deals with the application of Fourier transformation in numerical data analysis, rather than instrumentation, where it is often built in. Then, the author discusses the use of time-dependent signals. He also describes particular types of errors: The algorithmic deviations caused by replacing a differential equation by an approximation thereof. Next, the author will show you how to copy spreadsheet data into a macro, manipulate them, and return the result to the spreadsheet. He continues by looking at some common mathematical operations, often encountered in scientific data analysis, and their numerical implementations on the spreadsheet. In addition, the author shows you how to extend the set of tools available for matrix operations in Excel. Finally, he focuses on three types of spreadsheet-related errors: those that are rather easy to make on a spreadsheet, those that result from Excel's adherence to the IEEE-754 protocol, and those that are in hidden in Excel.

The author of this most excellent book has made a great effort to make it as broadly useful as possible to the reader, and to incorporate examples from different areas. More importantly, the author believes that this book offers instead, an attempt at the synthesis of different areas, thus illustrating how many numerical problems can be fitted comfortably in the convenient, user-friendly format of the spreasheet.

Every modern scientist and engineer relies upon some type of software for the analysis of data. Many software programs are available in the market today and each seems to have its own unique code and learning curve. In the PC world, perhaps no other software for data analysis is more common and easier to learn than Microsoft Excel. Many high school students are already using Excel for their homework assignments. All of these features make Excel an attractive analytical tool for scientists and engineers at university and afterwards. All such tools need reliable tutorials in order to train users to harness their full capabilities. Most available literature on Excel is introductory in nature, and therefore not appropriate for advanced applications. Robert de Levie's "Advanced Excel for scientific data analysis" helps fill in this void.

Prospective readers should be aware that this text is not appropriate for beginners. The author clearly alerts readers to this point in the preface. This is also readily apparent from browsing the Table of Contents. I was skeptical at first with some of the more advanced applications such as solving differential equations in Excel. Many scientists use higher-level programming languages such as Mathematica and Matlab to solve differential equations. While such software packages are quite powerful, they also have steep learning curves. I previously thought that Excel is not capable of solving differential equations, but Chapter 7 turned me into a believer.

The major emphasis of the examples is on least-squares and Fourier transformation. Chapter 2 does a nice job of contrasting Excel's three available routines for linear regression. The author does a very thorough job showing how Excel can be effectively used for Fourier transformation, and gives many examples. However, some other useful mathematical topics are either covered minimally or omitted entirely. For example, I was disappointed by the lack of a routine to calculate eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Excel's array structure makes it well-suited to linear algebra and the author should consider adding more on this topic in a future edition.

One of the greatest strengths of the book is its detailed coverage of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Advanced data analysis require the use of special user-defined functions, and VBA allows one to extend Excel capabilities to satisfy this need. Unfortunately, VBA code sometimes conflicts with Excel code. For example, the square root operation in Excel is SQRT, but in VBA is SQR. While the author certainly has no control over this, he does an excellent job alerting the reader to these pitfalls.

Chemists definitely need a reliable tool for the analysis of experimental data. de Levie's book covers most of the techniques we use in our lab. The book clearly demonstrates how Excel is not just a convenient tool for plotting data from the stock market or keeping track of students' grades, but a powerful tool for scientific data analysis. This book is highly rercommended for all students and research workers in the areas of analytical and physical chemistry.

If I had written this book I think I would have called it Scientific Excel rather than Advanced Excel. To be sure, the book is certainly for advanced Excel users, but it won't help you do an advanced business application.

You'd best have some knowledge about Excel before starting this one. There's a brief survey of Excel at the beginning that starts off comparing a spreadsheet to an accountant's ledger. That's pretty basic. Anyone with any Excel experience at all can follow the first three pages. On page four he is talking about making a thousand point plot with random numbers, normal distribution -- no longer something from Excel for Dummies. By page 5 he's calculating averages and standard deviations. By the end of this Survey chapter he's talking about the accuracy of the calculations performed by Excel.

Subsequent chapters discuss various types of mathematical manipulation that are often needed in the analysis of scientific data.

There are three chapters on Least Squares. This is the fitting of a curve to collected data so that the trends might be more easily visualized.

There is a chapter on Fourier Transformations, which is the probably the most frequently used analysis tool when working in signal processing. Geophysical seismic data, radar receivers, cell phone systems are all processed primarily using Fourier Transforms. This kind of data is of course too voluminous for Excel, but the techniques used here would be ideal for quite a number of laboratory applications.

A couple of chapters cover convolution, deconvolution, and time-frequency analysis as well as Numerical integration of ordinary differential equations.

All of these processing tasks are done using macros. These are described in the book, or can be downloaded from the author's website -- www.bowdoin.edu/~rdelevie/excellaneous/. This web site also includes some additional macros that enhance Excel's computationability when handling numbers of higher precision.

The final four chapters of the book are on writing your own or modifying existing macros, with an orientation to scientific analysis.

I consider this to be almost a mandatory book for anyone interested in using Excel to analysis scientific data.

This book does not give much info on Excel itself. I think the book is outstanding in that it opens one's eyes to using Excel for tasks like non-linear least squares fitting of data to models, signal deconvolution, etc. In retrospect, that one could use Excel for this should not be too surprising, but I have found myself resorting to MathCAD for many of these things when a solution implemented in Excel would have been easier to share with colleagues since Excel is more available. There is a bias towards biological/chemical examples, but nothing too egregious.

Very good book, expecially for the advices presents in it, unfortunately for some implementation aspects, the author, focuses too much on the Verilog language.

while there's a veritable sea of books discussing VHDL and other hardware design technologies, there's precious little in the realm of practical, roll up your sleeves and get the job done FPGA design info.

mr. kilts takes a very pragmatic hands-on approach to FPGA design and implementation with logs of examples, practical board level design advice and a book layout that focuses on what you need to get the job done.

the coverage of simulation techniques and considerations alone, is worth the price.

Books on basic logic design swarm the shelves. So do books on Verilog and VHDL. Why, then is logic design always learned on the job? I mean real, industrial logic design, with all the gritty bits. Kilts asked the question too, and wrote this book in response.

The first three chapters start in on the first three goals (conflicting goals, usually) of logic design: high speed, low power, and minimal area. Speed, of course, includes both throughput and latency - again, goals that often conflict with each other. Examples go well beyond the basic, on up to pipelined AES, a pipelined RISC, IEEE floating point units, and commercial standards for digitized audio, case studies with plenty of room to make the design points that Kilts means to get across.

The book's value comes from its willingness to get into technology specifics, way past the bland idealizations of pure logic design. For example, clock gating doesn't just make a design hard to follow, it often blocks the use of the chip's special purpose clock networks. Those have been engineered beyond belief for low skew under massive loading. You can use other wires as clocks, but you expose yourself to lots of ugly problems when you do. Special logic inputs matter, too, especially dedicated set and reset lines on flops. (I've seen some remarkable uses of the dedicated carry lines between closely coupled LUTs, too, but he doesn't touch on those.)

Of course, there are weak spots. Kilts touches on simulation and testbenches, but only touches. Testbenches and verification have their own texts, though, and exotica like mixed level simulations depend intimately on the specific tools at hand. A few pages, but only a few, presented maddening typos, like the capital-X-sub-i on p.125 where small-x-sub-i would have made sense (non-technical readers: if you made it this far, just trust me, it matters), or the resistor symbol in figure 15.12 where inductance is discussed. Section 8.2, on implementing math.h kinds of functions should simply have been dropped, or maybe replaced with a discussion on range reduction. The intended reader took Calc I and remembers the Taylor expansion. Being familiar is its only advantage, though. It doesn't minimize mean-square or maximum error, doesn't deal with endpoint continuity or differentiability in piecewise approximations (which aren't mentioned either), and has lots more problems. A list of grown-up techniques and references would have been far more helpful. Also, this text simply does not address one of the most pressing and painful issues in real-world logic design: compilation time. Although Kilts mentions floor-planning, he says nothing about how it supports incremental compilation, and notes tradeoff of result quality vs. turnaround in only one offhand phrase, as near as I could tell. Incremental compilation might be a non-Xilinx advantage, though, so forgivable within Kilts's stated limitations.

Kilts more than makes up for that small weakness in other areas, including discussion of parameterization. Because this is Verilog based, it doesn't mention VHDL's architecture configurability. Even in Verilog, though, parameterization appears pervasively in industrial design, especially when reuse matters, and rarely if ever shows its face in basic texts on logic design.

This book assumes that you already know Verilog well enough to build a simple pipelined processor, or at least to follow along closely. It also assumes that you've spent some time with industrial synthesis tools, and can translate from tool-specific advice in this book into the different but equivalent specifics of the tools that you're using. In academic terms, I'd call it a backup text for a third course in logic design, or for a course in something else that uses FPGAs heavily. It's not just for classrooms, though. Beginning professionals stand to benefit from this advice, and even battle-scarred logic designers who still remember 5V power rails might pick up a hint or two.

-- wiredweird

This is a great reference book for any level FPGA designer. This book skips past the basics unlike most books on FPGA design and jumps right into advanced topics that practical FPGA designers need to be aware of.

Plenty of discussion on the trade offs that must be faced in FPGA design based on you desired optimization target (speed, size, & power) and discussion of methods to achieve that goal. Lots of practical example code is used to illustrate each topic.

Discussion of simulation techniques and coverage which is becoming a key factor in verifying HDL based designs.

This book contains several topics that I have been waiting to see discussed well in a textbook including floorplanning and the pitfall of using asynchronous resets.

Besides HDL design techniques, the author discusses the PCB level design methodologies that must be used when designing an FPGA into a system. This disscussion is a great complement to this already fine book.

Finally! A book that actually talks about advanced design techniques instead of giving a historical overview of FPGA design.

I have to admit that I didn't read this book cover to cover. Rather, I use it for reference as needed. It's starting to get that same tabbed look that my other reference books have.

This is one of the best technical books I've ever read. It is very easy to read, no nonsense, very practical and packed with lots of designer's secret you probably won't find elsewhere. Although many newer ARM cores had been designed since the publication in 8 years ago, the content of remain relavent, as there are still many designs based on ARM7 and ARM9 which are explained very detail in this book (some limited coverage on ARM10). Maybe the author just need to publish a Volume II to continue from this book left, rather than another edision.

This book isn't just for ARM user, I would recommend it to any engineer or graduate student who deal with microprocessor. Most microprocessor textbooks only tell you 'how' a processor or a bus work. This book tells you 'Why'. The author tells from his real design experience on how to improve the professor performance by using different pipeline, memory architecture, cache, bus etc.

Buy it, it is fun to read!

In 20+ years of software development on a host of different target processors I've seen all kinds of documentation. My current projects represent my first exposure to the ARM. I have found this book to contain everything almost everything I've needed. The only thing that I'd like to see the author add in the next edition is a better discussion on EABIs (Extended Application Binary Interface). This book is a very good source for anyone needing to understand the guts of the ARM processor for software related needs. It is one of the better sources I used over the years.

This IS a good book. Plenty of contents. It's better be used as a mix-purpose book as a guide material and a referrence. You'd better focus what you want if you don't have that much time. Otherwise it will be a very good spare time reading.

This is a really good book to have ! Real stuff !

This book is very easy to read, but it also provides surprisingly quite detailed information that is sufficient to understand ARM chips' design and architecture. The book is almost self-contained although a little background in computer organization/architecture is helpful (but not necessary).

Excellent reference.

However, I didn't like the idea of using MIX assembly language. Book would have been more readable if examples were in plain english pseudocode (even better would be 'C'). At least second edition should have taken care of this aspect.

I also suggest books from Cormen & Sedgewick on same subject.

This book is bible of computer programming.

It contains most detailed explanation of searching and sorting methods I ever found in a book. Contains all internal sorting and searching and external sorting and searching algorithms.

The only drawback of the book is that all algorithms are written in MIX - some kind of assembler, and because of that they are hard to read.

I just bought the book I needed out of the set. I needed to build a database that did not use any commercial package (this gives full access and no royalties). This book saved my bacon. I almost did not buy it when all I saw in it was math. But I was desperate and it paid off. Turns out you could not explain it any other way. This book goes way beyond binary, and bubble sorts. I use it primarily for balanced trees. I may try some thing more exotic later. I can not tell you about the other volumes but this one will defiantly pay for it's self.

As a previous review said: "This is a book about the science of algorithms. Algorithms are either right or wrong."

Knuth uses the MIX programming language throughout, and if you hope to learn programming by reading this book, you should look elsewhere. Maybe someday we'll have 2^32 registers, but we will still be trying to make our programs work faster on this, as yet, uninvented architecture. The fundamental concepts will remain the same, and people will still be reading Knuth to understand them.

A good reference for serious computer science students. Others should look at O'Reilly. They have some really good books on visual basic.

This is an encyclopedia of what is known about sorting and searching and what computers can do. It is nothing else.

Graduate students in computer science (especially those in theory, algorithms and the occasional compiler fan) will benefit. Hackers and script kiddies will probably not benefit from this book.

First the basics: it's great, it provides wide-ranging and deep analysis, it shows many views and variants of each problem, and its bibliography is helpful, though not exhaustive. The historical notes, including sorts for drum storage, may seem quaint to modern readers. And sorting has been done, right? You just run a shell program or call a function, and tap into the best technology. Does it need to be done again?

Yes, if you're on the edge of technology, it does need to be done again, and again, and again. That's because technology keeps expanding, and violating old assumptions as it does. Memories got big enough that the million-record sort is now a yawn, where it used to be a journal article. But, at the same time, processor clocks got 100-1000x ahead of memory speeds. All of a sudden, those drum-based algorithms are worth another look, because yesteryear's drum:memory ratios are a lot like today's memory:cache ratios of size and speed - and who doesn't want a 100x speedup? Parallel processing is moving from the supercomputing elite into laptops, causing more tremors in the ground rules. GPU and reconfigurable computing also open whole new realms of pitfalls as well as opportunities.

Knuth points out that the analyses have beauty in themselves, for people with eyes to see it. His analyses also demonstrate techniques applicable way beyond the immediate discussion, too. Today, though, I have nasty problems in technologies that no one really knows how to handle very well. I have to go back and check all the assumptions again, since so many of them changed. If that's the kind of problem you have, too, then this is the place to start.

//wiredweird