Illegal Books!

[rabbit]

ZOMG!  My Systems Architecture book is illegal!  Also, it's orange.





And we can't forget my textbook from an older class, which is literally just a photocopy:

[Camel]

Comp. org. is an excellent class! At least, it was at my school; it was one of my favorites.

[rabbit]

The first class sucked, and the first half of the second class sucked, but the second half of the second class was awesome.  I think I'm going to really enjoy this class.

[Falcon]

I'm also using the Computer Organization and Design book for my digital circuits class, its black instead of orange.

[Camel]

The first class sucked, and the first half of the second class sucked, but the second half of the second class was awesome.  I think I'm going to really enjoy this class.

What have you done so far?

[Sidoh]

Comp. org. is an excellent class! At least, it was at my school; it was one of my favorites.

I thought it was interesting for sure, but I'm more captivated by the abstract. :)

[rabbit]

The first class sucked, and the first half of the second class sucked, but the second half of the second class was awesome.  I think I'm going to really enjoy this class.

What have you done so far?

The first lecture, he put up a diagram of a Random Access Machine that he made up, and we traced execution of the Random Access Language (also made up) across the diagram.  It was mostly about how the ALU/CPU/AC/Memory all interact, only on a really simple scale.  The second lecture was basically an overview of my ECE 200 class, which was mostly things like "this is a muxer, that is a decoder, this is how you use a K-map" blah blah blah.  The second half of that lecture, though, he started talking about the things that can be done with stuff learned in the course (it's basically a MIPS course).  He said one of his students' projects from a little while back was that he took Nintendo ROMs and changed all the sprites and text by messing around with the memory.  He also started a bit on how compiling works and optimizations and such (I didn't know you could compile to assembly, for instance).

[Camel]

(I didn't know you could compile to assembly, for instance).

Eh? Assembly is basically just human readable form of machine code. Did you mean that you didn't know that some compilers can dump the asm in place of the machine code?

[rabbit]

Yeah, something like that.  He didn't really explain what format it was in, just that it was in assembly (with a fancy .s extension).

[Camel]

Yeah, something like that.  He didn't really explain what format it was in, just that it was in assembly (with a fancy .s extension).

Yeah, I think that's what GCC uses for its human-readable asm output.

[Blaze]

The copy of C++ for dummies I have is to be only sold in India/Bangladesh/etc .  :P

[Sidoh]

I own quite a few international edition books: two algorithms books (Cormen and Tardos), an AI book (Russell), a stats book and a stats book.  They're all pretty ugly, with the exceptions of Cormen and Russell.  The "Eastern Economy Edition" books tend to not be so bad.  They're paperback, but they still have the same cover images and everything.  The pages tend to be really thin, but man are they cheap.  I saved over $200 getting them as opposed to shopping at the university bookstore.