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Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

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Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#1
Hey all,

I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good book about computer architecture. I program small-scale stuff on my own, but never had to learn any of the details about what C++ actually does (which interviewers seem to love asking) or what's going on past the programming part.

Re: Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#3
If you want to get into architecture in its own right, Hennessy/Patterson. But I think a far better book on the subject for programmers is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective."

This is a textbook out of Carnegie Mellon that I was exposed to in grad school. It goes into all kinds of details of processor architecture, memory, I/O, assembly programming, etc. while staying focused on its audience of a systems programmer in C. It's wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...

Re: Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#5
post #3

If you want to get into architecture in its own right, Hennessy/Patterson. But I think a far better book on the subject for programmers is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective." This is a textbook out of Carnegie Mellon that I was exposed to in grad school. It goes into all kinds of details of processor architecture, memory, I/O, assembly programming, etc. while staying focused on its audience of a systems p…

Corresponding Lectures: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html

Re: Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#6
John Paul Shen's _Modern Processor Design_ is my current favorite. It covers the design of recent (and also some historic) processor architectures, including pipelining, cache and memory systems, superscalar, and so on. Some concrete examples are given (e.g., PowerPC, x86).

Re: Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#9
Looks like you are asking two questions. "How does C++ get mapped onto real machines (and operating systems)?" and "How do machines really work?".

You might want to look at Yale Patt's book which begins from the bottom (gates and assembly language) and works up. http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Cp_27...

Re: Ask HN: Good books to learn more about computer architecture?

#10
A little known gem: The Elements of Computing Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...

This book takes you from logic gates to writing your own (extremely simple) virtual machine, programming language, etc. It's a bit fast paced and project based, but it'll run you through a very high level overview of the whole gamut.

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