Computation Structures (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Computation Structures focuses on computer architecture as a complicated problem in digital design. As such, the initial sections discuss the basic principles of designing digital circuits and systems. The context is subsequently used to discuss more and more advanced ideas without a lot of confusing structure. For example, pipelining is initially discussed in terms of speeding up simple arithmetic circuits, which allows the reader to focus on the conceptual issues of pipelining rather than the embedded problem. Using this aggregative approach, the authors build their way up through a series of simple machines to begin talking about processes and process semantics. In addition, Computation Structures contains a nice section on microcode, which is seldom discussed in most books. The text is clear and the exercises well chosen.