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Comment by timb07 | Hacker News Reader

I too loved "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", and read it all the way through before the semester even started.

Each chapter had a pithy quote at the start, and my favorite was the excerpt from the EDSAC instruction set:

Z -- Halt and Ring Bell: Stop the machine and ring the warning bell

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Meh, it has a lot of fallacies and pitfalls.

Can you elaborate a bit? Unsubstantiated drive-by insults aren’t very useful to other readers.

Edit: thanks for the explanation. Note to the several downvoters: you aren’t accomplishing much here by “punishing” innocent unfamiliarity with an in-joke...

It's a joke. Every chapter in the book has a section titled "Fallacies and Pitfalls" describing commonly held beliefs that should be avoided for the topic of that chapter. See for example page 58 here: https://books.google.com/books?id=cM8mDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...

Can you recommend a book that would serve as a useful prerequisite to CA: AQA? Based on your recommendation, I flipped through the first few pages on Amazon, but it felt a lot like Algebra 2 without knowing Algebra 1.

At my university CA: AQA was used as the text for the second course in computer architecture. The first course in computer architecture used this book: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fourth-A....

If you do get around to reading CA: AQA, you can follow along with this Coursera course (it's taught by the professor I had when I took it at Princeton, and he does a great job teaching it): https://www.coursera.org/learn/comparch

I don't have enough patience for courses. I sort of scan the material for what I really need or want to learn and ignore what's not interesting to me. I can make consistent A's with the benefit of Adderall, but I don't feel comfortable with that.

Your recommendation was very useful and interesting to me, and I bought the paperback. I was surprised that it was cheaper to buy a used paperback than to rent it via Kindle for a month.

It's another book by the same author - Computer Organisation and design : the hardware/software interface - http://a.co/aQYK7DG

If you want a more in-depth look at the book a quick google found me this on the first page results.

https://github.com/QSCTech/zju-icicles/blob/master/%E8%AE%A1...

Seconded, that's a great book.

Also, Hennessy was also one of the minds behind the MIPS architecture.

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