The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture

The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecturewas written to provide a textbook that incorporated all of the necessary organization and architecture topics, yet was concise enough to allow the material to be covered in one semester. This book covers all the core topics, including digital logic, data representation, machine-level language, general organization, assembly language programming, CPU organization, memory organization and input/output devices. The goal of The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architectureis to allow the students to tie the hardware knowledge covered in this book to the concepts learned in their introductory programming classes to give a complete and thorough picture of how hardware and software fit together.The Author's RationaleThe Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture is the outgrowth of two computer science organization and architecture classes that have been taught in the Computer Science program at Penn State, Harrisburg. The title of our book, The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture , is intended to convey that the topics presented in the text are those which are fundamental for a computer science major. This textbook introduces and motivates these topics, providing the breadth necessary for majors, while, at the same time, providing the depth necessary in specific areas. We do not expect students taking our course or using our textbook to have complete mastery of all topics presented. However, it is our firm belief that there are certain topics that must be mastered, there are those topics for which students must have a definite familiarity, and there are certain topics for which a brief introduction and exposure are adequate. This book endeavors to integrate the underlying principles in the major areas of computer organization and architecture, providing exposure to all topics relevant for an introductory class. Appropriate levels of detail have been given to the various topics based on the objective: exposure, familiarity or mastery, with additional appendices added for those topics other teachers might wish to cover in more detail. We were pleased, after completely modifying and condensing the course and text, that our new textbook outline fell in direct correlation with the ACM/IEEE Joint Task Force's new Computing Curriculum 2001 (CC-2001) guidelines for computer organization and architecture.