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Review:
Currently, computer users must navigate a sea of guidebooks, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and wizards to perform a task such as searching the Web or creating a spreadsheet. While Donald Norman acknowledges that the personal computer allows for "flexibility and power," he also makes its limitations perfectly clear. "The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever," he writes. "It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive." His vision is that of the "information appliance," digital tools created to answer our specific needs, yet interconnected to allow communication between devices. His solution? "Design the tool to fit so well that the tool becomes a part of the task." He proposes using the PC as the infrastructure ... Rest of this review on the detail page
(Review by amazon.com)
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Reviews (3) and details of The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution

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Book description
Now fully up to date and even more comprehensive than before, this latest edition of The Indispensable PC Hardware Book will continue to amaze and delight with its detailed explanation of every aspect of PC hardware. Whether you're a newcomer to the field or a veteran systems programmer you'll relish the very latest scoop on hot topics including Pentium Pro, the PCI Chipset and SCSI III. Key Features include: detailed explanations of core hardware topics (including all CPUs, 8086/88 to Pentium and Pentium Pro; all co-processors, 8087 to i387; AMD processors, Am386 to AM5k86, Cyrix CPUs:386 to 6x86; real, protected and virtual 8086 mode with Pentium enhancements; addressing, segmentation and paging; extended and expanded memory; ports, regis... Rest of this review on the detail page
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Reviews (2) and details of The Indispensable PC Hardware Book: Your Hardware Questions Answered (3rd Edition)

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Review:
Whether or not this book is indispensable depends largely upon how much you love hardware. Not just keyboards and disk drives, but digital electronics and transistors. Messmer delves not only into the machine, but into the soul of the machine, the CPU. You don't need this book unless you know, and care, what registers and caches are (outside of retail stores and traplines). The "Pentium" part of the title might also be misleading, for once in promising less than is there. Messmer examines the whole family of Intel processors, using the development to point out the differences between CISC (complex instruction set computer) and RISC (reduced instruction set computer). He also examines the range of Intel/BIOS bus architecture systems... Rest of this review on the detail page
(Review by Rob Slade)
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Reviews (1) and details of The Indispensable Pentium Book

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Review:
The major audience for a book on this topic will be fairly select. System designers, system hardware testers, developers of utility software, perhaps. The topics include communications from memory and peripherals to the CPU; memory address space; the logic of the reset circuit; 80286 and 80386 CPUs; dynamic random access, cache, and read only memories; bus structure, cycles, and mastering; the interrupt system; direct memory access subsystem; keyboard; numeric coprocessor; and timers. All of this is dealt with at a hardware level, concentrating on circuit lines that are asserted high or low rather than simply stating that such-and-such a character gets placed in a variable. This is hardware, and a lot of geeks don't even want to know ... Rest of this review on the detail page
(Review by Rob Slade)
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Reviews (1) and details of ISA System Architecture (3rd Edition)

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Review:
If you're a C programmer who's been dying to peek at the structures beneath the surface of the Windows 95 file system, this is the book for you. Jam packed with hands-on examples, it illustrates in gory detail how IFSMgr (the Installable File System Manager) in Windows 95 directs generic file-access requests from a variety of sources to the appropriate devices. Sections on VFAT, virtual memory, and VCACHE also describe low level file operations.
(Review by amazon.com)
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Reviews (3) and details of Inside the Windows 95 File System (Nutshell Handbook)