Second Hennesy & Patterson. Read it 12 years ago, still remember it vividly; everything made more sense afterwards.

It's expensive though; you might do just as well with a used older edition.

A somewhat perverse alternative approach: get a book on how debuggers work (like "How Debuggers Work").

I actually have the pleasure of taking a course with Patterson this semester. He's a great lecturer and he manages to keep the (sometimes very dry) material very interesting.

The book is pretty well-written, but I've found the exercises to be very hard to get through. Still, it's a great resource for this type of work.

Why the latest edition? We're using the 2nd edition (from 1998) in my computer architecture class this semester and it seems just fine. Even better was getting it off Half.com for <$10 after shipping.

Personally, I think that the latest edition has a lot of valuable material on parallelism and GPU programming. It's not strictly necessary for what he was asking, but its good stuff to know nonetheless.

Wow, that's a good deal. In my comp arch class, we've been forced to get the newest edition -- that is, the 4th edition, revised. Different from the 4th edition, which we used in computer organization last semester. I'm not sure how much new material has been added, but there's certainly a hefty price increase associated with buying the newest edition.

There are two books co-authored by Patterson and Hennessy. Which one do you mean? "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" or "Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface"?

Computer Organization and Design. The other book goes further in to detail about the hardware and is intended for an EE-oriented audience.