Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy & David Pattersson

For quite a while I’ve wanted to know more about the inner workings of CPUs in order to better understand why certain things are the way they are, endianess for instance. I posed the question on what book to get on the subject over at Stack Overflow and one of the recommendations was “Computer Architecture: A Quantative Approach” which arrived today.

The book is rather heavy and the kind of book where you’d like to have a professor condence the important parts for you but it contains the important sections that I was looking for such as pipelining and caches.

Update:

Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield

I forgot to mention that I also ordered a copy of “Machine Language for Beginners” which is an introduction to assembly programming on the 6502. This is a classic book and it’s available online for free (linked through the cover image above).

The book is bound by a steel spiral like the one you find in standard writing pads and I’m quite afraid to damage it considering the paper is somewhat aged so chances are I will leave my copy be and read the online version instead.