Hardware Books

This book was a tremendous help in learning how to use the ibook. Very comprehensive and teaches you every aspect of your ibook from turning it on to browsing the internet. It's a great book.

Love the Idiot series. This one gives new life to my poor old computer. Well written, easy and fun to plow through. Liz

This author really knows his subject well. He obviously has lots of experience with computers and wishes to pass that along to others. It's great for the beginner or expert.

Mark Minasi wrote the book, The Complete PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide and it was a proven winner. Now we have the perfect addition to that book and hands-on lab manual that makes learning easier and fun and will help even the most experienced technician.

The manual includes 41 labs that have you working on memory, hard and floppy drives, modems, irq conflicts, troubleshooting, upgrading and everything in between. Also included are lab reports, which will help you, track your progress along the way.

The appendix included covers the four essential upgrades, the power supply, the hard drive, the floppy drive and the scsi card. Missing from this book is a cd-rom with utilities and questions. Also the book should have been tailored around the A+ Certification.

Overall a good value for the money and the authors are very complete and thorough in the lab they give you. As with any lab manual there is only so many ways to do things, you can substitute your own problems for those in the book if you need to. A handy book for computer schools as well.

These two books were extremely helpful in getting me through the two A+ exams. they were recommended to me by my tutor when I did the A+ course. I am now a tutor at the school where I learned A+ and so have gotten back the money that I spent to buy the books and a lot more. Now that I am a tutor I am in turn recommending them to my students and have no hesitation in recommending them to anybody who doing or thinking of doing the A+ exams. The practice exams that come on the CD are almost identical to the Sylvan Prometric Format so you will be comfortable when you sit the exams

I have always liked Dr. Wilkinson's teaching. With the book written by the professor himself makes learning computer architecture a blessing.

I was in a gift stop a couple of weeks ago, and made a purchase, for which the clerk took a form book, wrote down what I was buying and the price (she added tax mentally and did not need a calculator), and having finished, she gave me a carbon copy and I was on my way. It has been years since I had such a pen and paper transaction. There is almost always an electronic cash register now, and it is usually hooked up to the big store computer, which also does the inventory, pay slips, and many other accounting and management functions. There was a time when computers were not a part of businesses, and now there is a time that they are almost universal. What was the first business computer, and what company put it to work? The surprising answer is in _A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer_ (Harper Perennial) by Georgina Ferry. It is an enchanting book about times long ago, even if it is about industrial history and computer development. The boffins who made and used their hand-built computer were well ahead of their times, and at least partially because of that, we know IBM and we don't know LEO, but LEO is worth knowing about.

Lyons was a firm one would not have predicted to be in the vanguard of business technology. Its famous stores throughout Britain served tea and cakes. As Ferry says, "A background in catering is not normally seen as an obvious qualification for hi-tech startup companies." But the Lyons shops had a progressive management, interested in contemporary scientific management principles, and took on a Cambridge graduate in mathematics, who realized that the primitive computers being developed in the US could be used for business. Much of the book involves the details of building the computer when computers consisted of a room full of electronic tubes (anachronistically termed "valves" because of the way they could turn off and on a stream of current). There were over 3,000 such valves, and cables all over the room to connect them, and of course, the resultant machine had far less computing power than the chip inside Tickle-Me-Elmo. Eventually, it worked. In 1951, LEO (for Lyons Electronic Office) took responsibility for bakery operations, and eventually took over such jobs as managing the payroll. At the time, there was no comparable machine anywhere in the world, and no commercial market for them.

So in 1954, Lyons the teashops created Leo Computers Ltd. After that, LEO's story becomes a sad one. They did produce machines, and the machines worked. The initial LEO computer did its jobs for fourteen years, before finally being turned off in a little ceremony in 1965. Another installed in 1958 at a steelworks was in continuous use until it was retired in 1971. "I don't suppose we shall ever again keep a computer in service as long as this one," said one manager. Some LEOs worked for the post office, coming out of service only in 1981. The man in charge of them said, "We were very fond of LEOs. They just worked. There was no reason to change them." The post office at one point actually wanted to buy more of them, but Leo Computers could not generate needed capital and had had to merge with other firms. Eventually LEO could not compete with the billions invested by firms like IBM. The American government, too, had backed American computers, while no comparable support came from the British government. Thus LEO is a footnote, not an ancestor, to current business computing, but the men who built it succeeded in a momentous and prescient project. Along the way, Ferry's wonderfully researched and entertaining book is able to summarize a lot of computing history, taking in such subjects as Alan Turing's work at Bletchley Park and John von Neumann's prophetic design of computer architecture. She also tells of the mechanical computers designed by the Victorian visionary Charles Babbage, who felt his inventions were slighted by his own government and admired by the Americans. It was a lesson that had not been learned a century later.

This book identifies the correct terms for computing history phases, and also shows the history for early computing well. A good read written by an IBM director in France.

This is an excellent book for beginners or as a review. Look at the large number of topics covered in the table of contents. Many excellent diagrams. Easy to read. Many basic concepts for computer hardware design are covered.

When I first began my study of digital logic, I was fortunate that the first book I used was "Digital Computer Electronics: An Introduction to Microcomputers" by Malvino. After working through that book, I moved on to this one. While this one is also dated, it still provides a sound introduction to the fundamental principles of digital circuitry before it moves on to the basics of programming in assembly language.
The chapter titles are:

*) Combinational logic
*) Combinational logic circuits and logic technologies
*) Sequential logic
*) Register-transfer logic
*) Arithmetic unit
*) Machine language programming
*) Assembly language programming
*) Memory
*) Input/output
*) Computer systems

The last chapter is the one that is most dated, the systems covered are:

*) Hp-35 calculator
*) HP 41C
*) MCS-4 microcomputer
*) PDP-8
*) PDP-11
*) VAX-11
*) Motorola M6800
*) Motorola M68004
*) IBM 370
*) Computer networks

However, using the principle of starting at the beginning, an examination of these processors and their instruction sets is an excellent place to continue the process of learning exactly what goes on inside a computer chip. Therefore, this book, in combination with the one by Malvino mentioned earlier, still make up an excellent combination for the person who wants to learn the basics of digital circuitry.