Structured Computer Organization: United States Edition

Structured Computer Organization, specifically written for undergraduate students, is a best-selling guide that provides an accessible introduction to computer hardware and architecture. Updated content is delivered via the familiar structure that has served instructors through four successful editions. This text will also serve as a useful resource for all computer professionals and engineers who need an overview or introduction to computer architecture.

This book takes a modern structured, layered approach to understanding computer systems. It's highly accessible - and it's been thoroughly updated to reflect today's most critical new technologies and the latest developments in computer organization and architecture. Tanenbaum’s renowned writing style and painstaking research make this one of the most accessible and accurate books available, maintaining the author’s popular method of presenting a computer as a series of layers, each one built upon the ones below it, and understandable as a separate entity. A CD-ROM for assembly language programmers is available for teachers.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has a B.S. Degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Systems Group. He is also Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems. Nevertheless, he is trying very hard to avoid turning into a bureaucrat.

In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, and local-area distributed systems. His current research focuses primarily on the design of wide-area distributed systems that scale to a billion users. These research projects have led to five books and over 85 referred papers in journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software. He was the principal architect of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, a widely-used toolkit for writing portable compilers, as well as of MINIX, a small UNIX clone intended for use in student programming labs. Together with his Ph.D. students and programmers, he helped design the Amoeba distributed operating system, a high-performance microkernel-based distributed operating system. The MINIX and Amoeba systems are now available for free via the Internet..

Prof. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and winner of the 1997 ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He is also listed in Who’s Who in the World.