BKIPCHRD.RVW 940419 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Heather Rignanesi, Marketing, x340, 73171.657@Compuserve.com P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 or Tiffany Moore, Publicity tiffanym@aw.com Bob Donegon bobd@aw.com John Wait, Editor, Corporate and Professional Publishing johnw@aw.com Tom Stone, Editor, Higher Education Division tomsto@aw.com Philip Sutherland, Schulman Series 74640.2405@compuserve.com Keith Wollman, Trade Computer Group keithw@aw.com Lisa Roth Blackman, Trade Computer Group lisaro@aw.com 1 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867-9984 800-822-6339 617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 5851 Guion Road Indianapolis, IN 46254 800-447-2226 "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book", Messmer, 1994, 0-201-62426-9, U$34.95 I'm not sure about indispensable, but it certainly is exhaustive. The fact that it is just shy of a thousand pages gives you only an indication, until you see the tiny type size used here. This is not a shopper's guide to the normal level of components. You get all the facts, it is true, but it is mostly at the level of pinouts and timing diagrams. This is for programmers and hardware hackers at the circuit board level and below. An introductory chapter at a very easy and readable level leads into details of the motherboard and various levels of Intel processors through the next four. Chapters six and seven cover memory and support chips. Chapters eight and nine deal with mass storage on floppy and hard drives. Interfaces, ports, input devices and graphics adapters are detailed in chapters ten to twelve. A number of appendices bring together related information, including a brief listing of the interrupt calls. Given the broad scope of the book, I found some of the "missing" information to be odd. There is a listing of the machine instructions for the 80x86 processors--but only the mnemonics, without the actual opcodes or basic descriptions. The serial ports and UARTs are described thoroughly as to pinouts, but the onerous task of ensuring against address and IRQ conflicts is not discussed. The author insists that even beginners could read this book--and he has every right to do so. If you are interested in the hardware at this level, the explanations are clear and well sequenced. For anyone curious about any of the low level operations of the computer this is a very thorough resource. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKIPCHRD.RVW 940419 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag