Computer Systems Organization and Architecture provides up-to-date coverage of fundamental concepts for the design of computers and their subsystems. Professor John Carpinelli presents material in this book in the same way he does in his classroom - by using simple examples to help readers understand concepts without getting bogged down in details. To make the material accessible to all readers, he has included two examples of increasing complexity: the Very Simple CPU which contains four instructions to illustrate very simple CPU design, and the somewhat more complex Relatively Simple CPU that builds upon the same design techniques and introduces some more advanced techniques.
Doesn't do a great job at explaining a lot of the topics and could be organized better. The addition of the Relatively Simple CPU should have only been a part of the CPU Design chapter, as its inclusion to later chapters takes away from them.
I didn't actually finish this book. We were using it in a class I was taking at school, and we didn't get through the entire book in the class, just up to chapter 9. What I read of it I really enjoyed, but now I'm onto other things.