pcs

Has a lot of good background, but if you are looking for in-depth information about the Pentium family, you should likely skip this book. The "Pentium and Pentium Pro" chapter starts page 753, "Pentium II, III and 4" starts page 783, and "Appendixes" star page 802, meaning 30 pages and 19 pages respectively on the last two Intel processor families.

Several references in the book state things like "just introduced" or "this year", but were obviously from early editions.

I recognize how hard it is to keep up to date - The current (as of this writing) architecture documents from Intel on IA-32e and AMD for AMD64 are several thousands of pages and free for download. Of course, I never expected 64 bit architecture discussion in this book, but but I was looking for a narrative that would set the base and context of modern 32 bit implementations.

I have read the first 140 pages of this book, and I really like it. So far, I have the following comments.
Good points:
1.) It covers both real and protected mode from the start. Other books wait until the middle of the books before they cover protected mode.
2.) Assembly language command mechanism are explained in great detail. The author explain exactly what's going on. How the data moved from memory to register, register to register, how the memory in a computer is organized, how exactly PUSH and POP command works etc. There are lots of diagram that illustrate his explanations.
3.) It covers from 8086 to Pentium II hardware architecture. Many books are strictly limited to outdated 8086 and 8088 processors.
4.) The exercises at the end of each chapter increases my understanding of the subject and answers to even numbered problems are available at the end of the book.

Bad Points:
1.)Assembly language and processor architecture are hard subjects. You have to read each chapter several times before you can get a good grasp of the topic.
2.)Some of the topic presented by the authors can not be easily understood until you read the subsequent chapters.

One suggestion for people who read the book: Make sure you know how to convert binary, hexadecimal and decimal number. You have to know these otherwise you can get lost. Some basic understanding of logic gates is also helpfull!

I'm currently studying Electronic Engineering, and this is our recommended text for the introduction to assembly module. I find i can't use the book as it does not lay out any subject clearly. Often parts of the language are used in examples then introduced and explained many pages later. If starting you have to get at least one other book.