BKIPENTB.RVW   960319
 
"The Indispensable Pentium Book", Hans-Peter Messmer, 1995, 0-201-87727-9,
U$29.95/C$38.95
%A   Hans-Peter Messmer
%C   1 Jacob Way, Reading, MA   01867-9984
%D   1995
%G   0-201-87727-9
%I   Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
%O   U$29.95/C$38.95 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 markj@aw.com 800-822-6339
%O   617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 bkexpress@aw.com
%P   496
%T   "The Indispensable Pentium Book"
 
Whether or not this book is indispensable depends largely upon how much you
love hardware.  Not just keyboards and disk drives, but digital electronics and
transistors.  Messmer delves not only into the machine, but into the soul of
the machine, the CPU.  You don't need this book unless you know, and care, what
registers and caches are (outside of retail stores and traplines).
 
The "Pentium" part of the title might also be misleading, for once in promising
less than is there.  Messmer examines the whole family of Intel processors,
using the development to point out the differences between CISC (complex
instruction set computer) and RISC (reduced instruction set computer).  He also
examines the range of Intel/BIOS bus architecture systems, covering ISA
(industry standard architecture), EISA (extended ISA), MCA (microchannel
architecture), VLB (video local bus) and PCI (peripheral component
interconnect) structures.  In addition, there is a quick overview of the other
major processor families, including the Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC and others.
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996   BKIPENTB.RVW   960319

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