general

This book covers everything from basic C programming to IA32 assembly language to the ridiculously mundane IEEE representation of floating point numbers to threads.

This is a great resource for engineers who are interested in comprehensive, hands-on, and rigorous understanding of system-level programming.

Finally someone has finally written a book that integrates software and hardware. A brilliant holistic approach. This book answered many lingering questions I had from previous classes. I beg professors to have mercy on their students by using this book.

OK, I haven't actually read this book, but I took Bryant and O'Hallaron's course in 1998 (the first semester it was offered, I think) and was a TA for it a year later. They saw the need for a new course for CS undergrads who were coming in and learning C++ and Java without really understanding the guts of the machine. Their course taught things like bit-level representation of numbers (including two's complement and IEEE floating-point), assembly language, virtual memory, memory allocation, caching and its effect on performance, and the basics of TCP/IP. It was a great course--very informative and a lot of fun--and since there was nothing else like it out there, they had to write this book to go along with it.

I'm sure the book lives up to the course--and if not, you can rate this review "very unhelpful!" (I did read drafts of the chapters while I was a TA, so I hope I know what I'm talking about!)