MIP

This is an official book that was published by MIPS and Joseph Heinrich was an employee of MIPS when he wrote the book. This one book teaches you everything necessary in order to program the MIPS series of processors. This is the definitive book on the 32-bit CPU instruction set, plus 64-bit extensions.

It's one of the best books on a microprocessor I've ever read. It includes everything - memory management, cpu exceptions, cache organization, etc., plus a full description of the instruction set, suitable as a reference for assembly-language programmers. I used this book while teaching a class on computer architecture at the University of Illinois.

You can get a free PDF copy fo this manual from the MIPS web site, however, I'd prefer to get the hardback or the paperback (it's grey - but out of print,). I don't even program the MIPS CPU any more but i lost my paperback and i want another since the MIPS chip is a very significant chip in the history of computer architecture.

I've used this book for several years to teach an undergrad course introducing CS majors to assembly language and computer representation of data.

The authors have chosen an interesting way to ease the transition from high-level language to assembly: they use several successively more realistic versions of the same (ultimately MIPS) assembly language, all of which run on a simulator provided with the book. The first models a memory-to-memory machine, with typed variables and no registers, allowing students to learn about the minimal arithmetic and control operations (including a limited form of procedure calling) of assembly language without worrying about other concerns. In this context they spend two chapters on integer, floating-point, and character representation. In Chap. 7 they introduce memory addresses, using an array-like syntax familiar to high-level-language programmers, and show how to implement simple data structures. In Chap. 8 they introduce registers and type-specific operations thereon, pointing out that in a load/store architecture like MIPS, all arithmetic actually works on registers. Chap. 9 treats procedures more fully. This constitutes a minimal course; the remaining five chapters can be used as time allows. Chap. 10 discusses assemblers, machine code format, and the "true" MIPS assembly language; chap. 11 discusses I/O, chap. 12 interrupts and exceptions; chap. 13 performance; and chap. 14 other approaches to computer architecture.

I switched to this book when I found Hennessy & Patterson too advanced for my students, and it has served me well. Students are sometimes a little confused about which version of the assembly language we're using at the moment, and I wish the author of the simulator had put in a three-way choice rather than accepting all three languages at once, but I still think the approach works better than throwing the kids in the deep end.

Excellent book for MIPS. Read this first then
use the official documents from MIPS or your
MIPS cpu vendor. If you are an embedded programmer
learning MIPS or bringing up a MIPS system this
is your bible. The code snippets are extremely
useful also.

If you are looking for a book which gets you up and running with MIPS then look no further. This book explains its history and everything you need to know to start `messing around' with the MIPS RISC CPU.
The author also provides a lot of `gotchas', which he learned from prior experience from developing on/with the MIPS CPUs. Valuable insight in those little things which will ease your life as a developer.
Aside from the info provided by the author on the MIPS CPU itself, it also explains a great deal about basic processor technical knowledge, thus making the book a breeze to read for those of us with no extended experience in CPU internals.
Like one of the other reviewers said though, for a real reference with regard to the mnemonics and other instruction related things you might want to get the PDF files from the mips.com site and use those next to your See MIPS Run book.
They supplement each other well.

This is an outstanding book that is written by an author who knows his stuff. It covers a lot more material than just the MIPS architecture, although if that's what you're looking for, it's THE best MIPS book, and I have them all.

Sweetman THANKFULLY covers many topics that aren't unique to MIPS, such as pipelines, caches, memory management units, floating-point processing, etc... in addition to going into great detail specific to the MIPS variants.

The sign of a very good engineer/author/technical writer is someone who takes something that is complicated and involved, and makes it easy to understand. Sweetman is such an author.

On top of all that, the book makes for enjoyable reading and has a very conversational/friendly tone (but don't get me wrong, it is quite in-depth and technical.)

If you're working on any RISC architecture, including other variants such as PowerPC or ARM, this book is for you.

This book offers an overview of the assembler language, designed for the family of mips processors r2000 and r3000 (nothing about r4000 and r6000 series). It also shows common C-functions translated in assembler. It explains, in general guidelines, the internal architecture of the r2000 processor thus not as deep as D. Patterson's books.

Beyond this, the text is a bit confused, the chapters don't lead the reader to any meaningful point, offering pieces of explanations thought for an already instructed reader. In fact a beginner won't find here a good introduction to the subject. E.g. at the very beginning, when the author deals with the structure of the registers (with many long, meaningless words without any explanation), does anybody know what a 'C0_BADVA' is? After that it goes along, is a single page, to the stack and the initialization of the eproms.

If, on the other side, the reader already knows the subject, this book is a good and useful giude when he needs source codes and hits for his code writing. If someone wonders where a mips processor can be found... Uhm.. In a Playstation or in a handheld.

Well this text is particulary suitable for courses dealing with computer science. Last but not least the price. In my humble opinion si quite hight for a 350 page-long book.

This book recalls the story of an early 1990s startup company's journey to the public market, with the climax being its Going Public Day.

Because it was writen by a reporter, the book reads more like a broken-up newspaper article than a story. Each chapter is a tangent to the company's journey to IPO day. Some are more relevant than others. Furthermore, the author has a style of switching persons while telling the story, which makes for confusing reading a times.

However, the book does provide good insight into detailed trials a company faces during its IPO route. If you are into IPO non-fiction it may be worth your read. If you enjoy entrepreneurial non-fiction, then I highly recommend "Startup - A Silicon Valley Adventure Story"

Though I found the book to be humorous and at times enjoyable, I felt the author could have done a better job trying to prove his point. It was hard to tell whether he was trying to say going public is the best way to maximize profit or if it is the best way to bring on an early heart attack. He blatantly describes the travails of MIP's computer company as they try to go public (he describes the extraneous hours, constant, and fears). Though he was trying to show that despite the problems and hard work there is a substantial gain, I was so sucked into the pitfalls that I wasn't sure if the gain was worth it. I would recommend this book to people who want to learn about going public versus staying private, it will help you know what you're getting yourself into.

The first edition of this book (MIPS RISC Architecture, by Gerry Kane, ISBN 0135847494) was an excellent book: it described well and completely the R2000/R3000 processors, their instructions, and how to program them.

This, the second edition, tries to expand on that, but does a stunningly poor job. While is has been expanded slightly to cover some R6000 and R4000 topics (e.g. some changes to the CP0 architecture), it fails horribly at describing at crucial elements of the R4000. For instance: the fact that the R4000 is a 64-bit CPU. Very few of the instructions that first appeared in the R4000 are described, and in particular the 64-bit CPU instructions seem to be omitted entirely. Worse, some of the text, e.g., relating to CP1 (FPU) data types and registers, which was perfectly clear in the first edition has been muddied by generalizing it for R6000/R4000. The result is that this edition fails to present a clear picture of *either* the R2000/R3000 or later MIPS processors.

If you're interested in learning about MIPS architecture, even historical (R2000/R3000) MIPS architecture, I'd suggest looking elsewhere: See MIPS Run is quite good (but not excellent in my opinion) and covers a wide range of topics. The first edition of this book is an excellent reference about R2000/R3000, but is limited to them. The MIPS architecture documentation manuals from MIPS themselves tend to be clear and complete references, but lacking in background information. I'd bet that many other MIPS-related books are great. But this one isn't.

The book has a good amount of solid information. What I mean by solid, is it has the "real" information you need to understand the MIPS architecture. It is well written and very understandable. It is more understandable than many other architecture books I have used before.

Having taken the class at UW-Madison for which this book was written, and my instructor being Karen Miller (one of the authors), even she admitted to the great number of errors. It is highly frustrating to open the book read something, and then wonder, "Gee, is this correct?" Constantly referring to Karen's list of webpage errors was frustrating. Chapter 9 was completely re-written and made available to us in PDF format because the book's version was poor.

I'm shocked that the university is still using the text. Though it was only slightly easier to follow the material since the author was also my instructor, she also seemed annoyed that through some departmental/political/publishing snafu that they are still using the text 10yrs later.

Avoid this book if you have a choice.

THIS BOOK STARTS OUT WELL, AND THEN DEGENERATES INTO ERRORS, ERRORS, ERRORS, AND MORE ERRORS. THE CONCEPTS IN THE LAST FEW CHAPTERS ARE EXPLAINED TERRIBLY. I FEEL GENUINELY SORRY FOR ANYBODY TRYING TO GET AN INTRO TO COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE CONCEPTS BY READING THIS BOOK.