Computer Science Books

I'm very impressed with "Complete Digital Design" (2003) in that it covers all aspects of modern digital design (with the exception of CMOS IC electronics). The coverage isn't superficial either- the author is very concise but still insightful in his overview of digital logic and computer architecture.

Unlike nearly every other digital design book, the author also covers basic analog electronics, signal integrity and system design in general. This book should be considered the new bible of digital design since it's much more up to date and useful than the far better known "Art of Electronics" (1989).

The only drawback to this book is the very small font-size of the text! If you're curious how a book that's only 460 pages can cover so much material, well there's your answer unfortunately :(

Ah, I wish I'd found this book two years ago. Back then, when I just started working as an EE, the benefit I could gain from the book would be huge. Today, knowing at least 90% of what is has to say, I'm still very much impressed.

Mark Balch takes a unifying approach I haven't seen in other books. Deciding to focus on the complete spectrum of digital/electronic design is a great decision, since most of the books out there either pay attention only to logic and assembly or only to leakage currents in diodes and bode plots of filters. Often, an EE has to work closely with both worlds, which is what the author of this book understood and filled 460 pages with valuable information.

On one hand this book teaches digital logic (with nice practical aspects, for example the 7400 family), computer architecture, memory, communications (with a great section explaining all the nuts-and-bolts of the omnipresent RS232/422/485 family of
standards), networking, state machines, FPGAs and CPLDs.

On the other hand, it doesn't neglect the low level stuff. A good overview of basic electronics is given, including information on diodes, transistors, op-amps and ADC/DACs. It doesn't stop there and discusses the practical aspects of design I haven't seen described in other (non-textbook) books - clock distribution, power regulation/distribution, signal integrity and various debugging techniques.

What I liked especially is that the author doesn't get into the topics too deep - there's textbooks and data-sheets for that. He gives theory when needed, focuses on the practicals and refers to other sources of information. In particular, the section that explains how to read data-sheets and what to pay attention to while reading is a gold-mine for young engineers.

I think this book can be very useful for fresh engineers - to get quickly informed of the wide spectrum of design practices or even for students of EE - to see the bigger picture. To seasoned professionals it won't provide much new knowledge.

I have never read such a nice book detailing so much of multi-vendor interoperability issues. It helps you with the protocol knowledge itself and practical knowledge with router configurations. My colleague in PS, Hannes really knows what this is all about.
This book, while pours much theorectical knowledge though, doesn't put me to sleep.
Actually anyone who are interested into large-scale SP network design should read that, at least 3 times. It helps you grow in the telecom field.

Walt is one of the most prolific networking authors in the industry, and Hannes is one of the few true IS-IS experts in the world. Friends and colleagues both, I am delighted that Hannes and Walt have pooled their extensive experience to produce what is destined to be a classic volume for IP engineers. Going far beyond the basics of the protocol, Hannes details the many design touches--both subtle and not so subtle--that go into creating a real-world IS-IS implementation. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand IS-IS at a deep level, from network architects wanting to understand how to design a large-scale IS-IS network to software engineers wanting to write carrier-class IS-IS code to CCIE and JNCIE candidates who need to understand the protocol but have had little opportunity to work with it in a production environment. And despite the technical deep-dive, the book is written in a friendly, readable style with frequent flashes of humor. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this book to anyone wanting to truly understand IS-IS.

This book is quite idiosyncratic in its kind. The content is quite theoretic, so that probably it won't be the best choice for more pragmatic and practice-oriented courses, for which the two books from Patterson-Hennessy, e.g., will be more suited. However, the value of this book lays in the shocking amount of knowledge it carries. This is the classic gap-filling book: my opinion is that many CS student of us that will read this book page by page, will discover that they really didn't know something they thought they knew instead. This is simply because the discussion is organic and continuos from the start to the end, and the writing is never too hard, so that any gap will easily show itself during the reading.

Have a look at the table of contents. It starts from digital logic basics and it ends at the Interrupts chapter (this means, almost, operating systems). The distance seems to be prohibitive, but the path traced by prof. Ward and Halstead is remarkably solid and meaningful. Once basic logic circuits blocks are covered, it leads to computation issues (from FSM to Turing Machines), passing from performance considerations (e.g. pipelining) and memory hierarchies (cache memory is extensively covered).
Two chapters are devoted to milestone architectures: the S machine and the G machine. Such a thorough coverage on these two machines is something I've not found in other books.
The chapters on Processes, Processor Multiplexing, Processes Synchronization and Interrupts are good and at the level of an OS course. The astonishing thing is that the background to face these issues is well built before (again, recall that the book starts from basic Logic Levels !).

This book has been a very worthy read. My course used materials from different books, internet resources and my instructor's knowledge. The instructor itself suggested us to give the book a complete read when we had time (we didn't cover all the topics of the book) because we would have really learned important things. I've not done it completely, but the more I do it, the more I agree.

Ward and Halstead have put together the best introduction to computing hardware I've seen. Only Wirth's Digital Circuit Design for Computer Science Students equals it, but with a slightly different thrust and a good deal less detail in its coverage. The authors wrote this book as a text for a grueling one-semester course, but I can imagine it working well as a two-term book for students who need more time to absorb material.

It twenty-one chapters (plus appendices) start at the transistor level, then "whole-heartedly accept the digital abstraction." Fast-paced discussions apply that abstraction to the workhorses of digital design: binary numbers, logic realization, state machines, and synchronous design discipline. By the book's midpoint, it already addresses microcode control of the datapaths that students have already examined, and move on to implementation of two different insturction sets on microcoded platform that the students designed (with guidance) and built. Given this gritty level of understanding, the last chapters address system issues, including the software process abstraction, operating system concerns, and a little about interfacing to electronics outside of the processor itself.

Omissions matter as much as inclusions in the book's syllabus. The text breezes over logic minimization, logic hazards, state machine design, giving just enough of each tool for a student to get a job done. Asynchronous design appears only briefly, to explain the goings-in inside of latches and registers. Large-scale issues of clock jitter and skew appear briefly if at all. Students who eventually need to know the fussy bits can learn them elsewhere, but those bodies of knowledge really don't support the goal of computing system design. By analogy, a mechanical engineer could study the details of a screw's thread pitch, depth, and geometry or of steel's metallurgy, but neither will really help in building a bridge. Those low-level details matter, but interfere with higher-level integration.

One aspect of this book deserves equal praise and complaint. The 1990 copyright date means that it's quickly moving into the past. It treats TTL and even RTL as going concerns, and omits FPGAs completely. To be really useful, this book's obsolete technologies need an update. At the same time, this older perspective keeps microcoding alive and well, the only book I know that puts it in the students's hands and put it to work. Microprogramming is an idea whose time has come (again) in control for large-scale logic design, as a useful step between the mouse-milking fussiness of state-machine control and the heavyweight sluggishness of standard instruction set processors. More importantly, this puts the processor's instruction set and basic operation back under the student's control, where it needs to be for today's configurable computing.

Don't let the age put you off. No other title surpasses this as an introductory text for designers of computing hardware. It bridges the much-ignored gap between logic design and computer architecture. It neither bogs down in carry chains and Booth multipliers, nor leaps ahead to virtual memory and interprocessor communication. I recommend it to any student who wants a practical approach to this important layer in computing's conceptual stack.

-- wiredweird

I'm a student digging into the cryptology for an year. The more article I read, the more confusion I encounter because of my poor mathematical background. However, when I get this, I could find answer to my puzzles, and make an more explicit way to settle down my own idea.

This book is a marvel. It is clear and concise yet thorough. The author is obviously a bit of an obsessive compulsive, he has found the shortest paths from the clearest definitions to the most important results, each given with the cleanest, most insight-inducing proofs ... the results (and definitions) he gives are the ones any student (practitioner!) of modern computer science (especially cryptology) *needs* to know -- having this book on your shelves (and its contents in your head) should be a requirement for any degree, at any level, in computer science.
[Caveat: I know the author and have read his book in draft form. I also required my students to get it and read it, in a computer science course I taught.]

This is another great book by these authors. Their earlier book `Molecular Symmetry and Spectroscopy; the second edition' is a must buy for any spectroscopist as is the one under review here.

Theoretical molecular spectroscopy has been the subject of intense activity in the last decade as a result of the increasing availability of powerful computers. Computational Molecular Spectroscopy is the first book ever to provide a comprehensive treatment of modern computational techniques for predicting/interpreting molecular spectra.

Comprised essentially of four main parts, the book is a must for research workers in high resolution molecular spectroscopy and in quantum chemistry. It is also highly useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students of physics and chemistry, who are just starting out in the field.

The four main areas covered include:

1. Ab initio calculation of potential energy surfaces and other electronic properties of molecules

2. Perturbation-theory-based and variational approaches to the calculation of spectroscopic data

3. Theory of calculating rovibronic energies, including the Renner and Jahn-Teller effects

4. Special topics of high current interest: highly excited states and local modes, semi-classical approaches, time-dependent phenomena, and the Car-Parrinello approach

Removes the unnescesary mathematical approach to the introduction of the stiffness method. Even an undergraduate can understand with minimal effort. This has to be the best introductory text to the stiffness method as it paves the way for further understanding of the more advanced topics such as finite elements.

Do you want to know how to develop your own Structural Analysis software? Then this is the book for you! You will learn how to develop codes for 2D and 3D Trusses, 2D and 3D Frames, Grillages and there is even a chapter on Structural Dynamics.

I've used this book or versions of it for a couple of years now...I've often been asked in regular science education classes or in neuroscience or biology situations, "How do we make this stuff accessible to those with disabilities?" Thank heavens for all the tremendous work done by this group and other innovative inventors who strive to put Deaf people like me and those with learning, visual, and orthopedic disabilities on an equal footing with everyone else. This book has more than served its purpose and paid back its price many times over. Teachers and professors are always amazed at the amount of work that is ongoing in this area, as well as the amount of money out there for developing computer technology for the disabled through the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the National Institute of Health, as well as individual companies.

We will never make this country totally computer literate if we exclude specific populations. As the push for inclusion of students with disabilities in regular schools and acceptance of these students becomes stronger, it is absolutely critical that teachers be aware of both hardware and software that can make their curriula more accessible to both disabled and 'normal' students.

I fully endorse and encourage teaching universities and educators and librarians to make sure an updated version of this book is made available so that all students have an opportunity to achieve their highest abilities. Karen Sadler Science Education, University of Pittsburgh

The Alliance for Technology Access is a network of community-based resource centers dedicated to providing information and support services to children and adults with disabilities. Toward the furtherance of their mission that have produced Computer And Web Resources For People With Disabilities, now an expanded and thoroughly updated third edition. Computer hardware and software provide children and adults with an unprecedented opportunity to interact with the broader world of work, education, recreation, and socialization. Featured in this superb instructional reference are recommendations for making use of conventional, assistive and information technologies; illustrative personal stories of people using technology in their daily lives; details about state-of-the-art computer technology (including screen enhancements, speech synthesizers and customized keyboards); new and extensively updated listings of Internet resources, publications, support organizations, and vendors. Computer And Web Resources For People With Disabilities is an absolutely essential, core acquisition for personal, professional, academic, community library, health center, and community center disability resources library reference collections.

For those of you sick of engineering texts filled with a bunch of theoretical junk, this is the book for you. It very nicely blends a little bit of theory with some real-world practical applications and the software in the back really brings hydraulic engineering into the 21st century.

If you're a civil engineer looking to make a move these days, it will pay you to know how to use the software tools built by Haestad. This company is the standard in water modeling. I used this book in college and recently acquired the latest edition to bone up for a water resources position that was being offered in California. This book dispenses with all the deep theory and gets right down to the practical business of modeling. Since, it includes academic versions of all the standard models, it was easy to get a refresher course, and I held my own during the interview.

I like the fact that Haestad Methods has added more software and coverage. Highly recommended.

The book is an exceptionally clearsighted introduction to the topic of RISC. With many lookbacks on existing processors the authors weighs the pros and cons on almost every aspect of the design. I especially enjoyed the lengthy discussions of what an operating system (unix in this case) expect from the hardware and how the two cooperate in the best possible way.

It's discussion on different file systems does not directly have a bearing on the RISC architecture but fits in very snugly in giving a most complete general overview of a computer system. There's more to it than a good processor.

Read it! You'll learn a lot - not only about RISCs - but also what has driven hardware designers in the microprocessor industry for decades.

Good introduction of RISC CPU design. This book illustrates some of the architectural trade offs that real designers make when introducing a new CPU architecture. I especially like the fact that the authors went into great detail about the software and hardware aspects of the CPU design.

This book is great for anyone who likes art. I got it from the library and I'm trying to get the supplies to make everything in the book before its due back!
Get this book now!

My son read this book and he wanted to make all the crafts right then