This textbook was required reading for my Computer Organization and Architecture university course.  Sometimes it can be difficult to give a textbook a fair review because, in a typical course, students are rarely required to read the entire book and they may be given reading assignments that are not in sequential order.  This means it’s not easy to judge the progression of the material as presented in the textbook from beginning to end.

Such was the case with this textbook.  In my class, we skipped around and read different sections from different chapters rather than reading any single chapter all the way through.  One thing I was impressed with, given how much we skipped around, was how easy it was to pick up each section we were asked to read.  Even if it was a section in the middle of a chapter we hadn’t read from before.  

Unlike some textbooks I’ve read, there weren’t any cryptic terms or acronyms that I couldn’t easily find the definition to.  Definitions for new terminology were noted in the margins, making it easy to refer back to them if needed.  In general, explanations were clear and the examples were good.  However, there were quite a few grammatical/spelling errors and there was some awkward phrasing that required rereading in order to understand what the authors were trying to convey.  Sometimes they skipped intermediate topics, such as jumping from a single-cycle datapath to a pipelined datapath without covering the multi-cycle datapath which I understand was in previous editions of the book.  My university course provided very good supplementary content and I found the concepts easy to understand when presented in that logical progression.  I might have struggled more if I had been limited to the book's presentation, but it's hard to say for sure since I wasn't in that position.

I don’t normally comment much on the physical aspect of books I read, but this book was literally falling apart as I read it.  School textbooks are the only type of book that I still purchase in a physical format, and this textbook was no exception.  I saw a couple reviews on Amazon where reviewers mentioned that their pages fell out, but I needed the textbook and I wanted it in a physical format, so I bought it with the plan to be extra careful with the pages.  Sure enough, as soon as I started reading, pages started randomly falling out.  I would gingerly turn a page, and sometimes the page would turn and come out of the book.  I don’t resell my textbooks, but anybody who does probably wouldn’t be able to resell this one.  Maybe that was the goal…

The falling pages became quite a problem for me because I took several business trips while taking this course and I was afraid to travel with the book.  I didn’t want to have pages falling out all over the place and getting lost where I would never find them again, and I figured the flimsy book would never survive my laptop bag or my suitcase, so I purchased the e-book version of the textbook to use while traveling.  The e-book version had its own issues.  There weren’t any page numbers, which could be a problem when I needed to reference specific pages for my class, and the tables and diagrams were very small.  I was reading on a 10.5” tablet, with a screen nearly as big as the pages in the physical book, but the size in the e-book was drastically different from the size on the printed page and did not fully utilize the space. I constantly had to zoom in on them so I could read them, which meant I couldn’t see them in context with the text on the page.  Perhaps all of this is normal with e-textbooks; I haven’t read enough of textbooks in this format to know.  It definitely frustrated me, though.

This book was required reading for my 20th Century European History course as part of my university degree program.  I should start off by saying my knowledge of history is truly horrible.  The subject didn’t interest me at all when I was young, and I paid as little attention as possible.  But I’m a lot older now (I’m a returning student, not a traditional college-aged student), and I enjoyed the opportunity to remedy some of my ignorance.

There were both good things and bad things about this book.  I liked the way the book went into detail about the various events.  It didn’t just say “this happened and then that happened”.  It explained things from the perspectives of all of the major players involved so that I could better understand why things happened the way they did.  For me, that was what made it really interesting – understanding how and why things happened.  The authors also highlighted turning points, and even engaged in some speculation as to what might have happened if different paths were taken.  As with any textbook there were parts that I found dry and boring, but I was more interested in what I was reading than I had hoped to be.

However, I had some real trouble with the organization of the material.  The book jumped back and forth in time a lot.  It often focused on one geographic area and/or topic and described events that happened over several years, and then it moved to a new area/topic and went back in time.  The problem is that events were usually pretty intertwined.  Things discussed in one section were often relevant to things discussed in other sections from the same time period.  By splitting them up, I had trouble keeping track of the context of events and I had to do quite a bit of re-reading to keep track of what was happening when and how it was all connected.

The time hopping happened constantly throughout the book, and in many different forms.  It happened between chapters, within chapters, and even within section breaks.  One simple example of what I’m talking about occurred in Chapter 17.  On page 492, the Common Market is being discussed.  We’re told that it helped improve peace in Western Europe and, as an example of that improved peace, we’re told that German NATO troops were training on French soil in the mid-1960’s without creating any sort of a stir.  Then, a little bit later on the same page, we switch to a topic that covers NATO and we’re back in 1948.  So, on the very next page, the French are upset because a separate German army was being recreated.  

This organization style also meant that terms, concepts, and people were sometimes introduced well before the sections where they were discussed in depth.  I was constantly doing double takes and skimming back over previously-read material to try to understand apparent contradictions.  And sometimes, the dates just weren’t mentioned that clearly.  We also skipped around a bit with our assigned chapters in my class, although we did eventually read the entire book, so that exacerbated the problem.  But there was plenty of confusion to be had for me within single chapters.

I can understand the purpose of focusing on one topic or region at a time.  Europe is a large continent and there were lots of things going on, so it would surely be equally confusing if the authors had tried to present the entire history in precise chronological order.  But I do think many of the topics were split out more than necessary and would have flowed better if discussed in chronological order within a single section.  Another thing that might have helped would have been chapter timelines listing the major events discussed in the chapter in chronological order, with perhaps a higher-level timeline at the front of the book to help with keeping track of the big picture.  Of course, if I’d had a better foundation in history to begin with, I might have been able to follow the book more easily.

This textbook was required reading for a Computer Networking course.  As far as college textbooks go, it was pretty good.  I learned the material from it that I needed to learn.  The textbook was well-organized, and it was easy to understand.  It had quite a few analogies and real-world examples that aided in understanding.  

For me, this textbook was a pretty dry read and I sometimes had trouble pushing through the weekly reading assignments.  However, networks are not an aspect of Computer Science that I’m particularly interested in, so this was to be expected.  I usually found the beginning of each chapter interesting, but my interest tapered off about halfway through and the rest was a chore to get through.  However, I did learn a lot about how networks work.  I may not retain all of the nitty-gritty details over the long term, but I expect the main concepts to stick with me.

I think one of the best parts of this textbook were the Wireshark labs at the companion website, which my professor used for some of our assignments.  I had fun learning how to “sniff packets”, and I liked seeing the protocols in action for myself using real, live information being passed to and from my own personal network.

Aside from my subjective complaint about the dryness of the material, my only other real complaint is in regard to the acronyms.  There were an amazing number of acronyms, and many of them were not in the index so it could be difficult to find the original definitions again.  Once an acronym was defined once, it was not defined again – at least not within the chapter in which it was introduced.  (The chapters were 70-100 pages long.)  A glossary of acronyms in the back of the book would have really helped.  To any future readers of this textbook, I recommend making a note of each acronym you encounter and at least noting the page # where it was first introduced in case you need to reference its definition again.

Originally read March 30, 2014

I read this textbook for a college course with a focus on object-oriented programming. We didn’t have to read every chapter, but we read the vast majority of it.

The textbook was easy to understand, with a large number of examples used to illustrate concepts. The examples were clearly written, with a discussion after most examples that explained what was done in more detail. I already had programming experience, but not with Java and not with object-oriented programming.  That experience may have helped me pick up the material easier, but I do think this book would be equally accessible to a beginning programmer. The first few chapters in the book are extremely basic.

As a working adult, I would have liked more real-world examples in the textbook. Most of the programming examples involved games or puzzles. I guess the goal was to engage a traditional college student without much real-world working experience who might get bored with, say, business application examples. But I’m not a traditional college student and, while the examples were often amusing, I personally would have been more interested by practical examples with a career-oriented focus. I actually think a career-oriented focus would be more beneficial for traditional college students also because they might not have enough experience to extrapolate for themselves how the examples provided could be applied toward their future career.

I did enjoy the humor throughout the book. It was usually pretty corny, but any humor is welcome when you’re plowing through the otherwise dry material in a college textbook. I also liked that the textbook wasn’t too repetitive as is a problem with some textbooks. Even when examples were provided that built off previous examples, the changes and additions were in boldfaced type so that you could clearly see what was changed in the program without being forced to reread the entire thing.

Originally read November 26, 2013

This book was a required textbook for a recent college course. My interest in the subject was high, and I enjoyed learning PL/SQL. The book was easy enough to understand, and I learned PL/SQL as a result of reading it, but I wasn’t a huge fan of the format.

Each chapter starts off with a brief introduction about the topic and then there are usually two or three sections within that chapter, each of which is referred to as a “Lab”. Each lab starts off with a short discussion of the basic concepts and syntaxes related to the topic. The real detail of the material is found in the lab exercises that follow. The lab exercises take a variety of formats.  For example, one exercise might contain sample PL/SQL code which you need to read to see if you can figure out what the code does.  Another example of an exercise would be a requirement to add something new to previously-provided code.

The answers to the lab exercises were provided immediately after each exercise. So you could either walk through the exercises yourself, or you could just read through the exercises, come up with the answers in your head, and then keep on reading to see if you were correct. Given that I already had homework assignments as part of my coursework, and since I did not find any of these concepts to be challenging, I chose the latter method.

In theory, this isn’t such a bad format. The question/answer format might force lazy readers to think about what they’re reading a little more. I think it was the organization that I really had trouble with. The information often seemed too repetitive to me because some information was provided in the lab discussion before the exercises, and then discussed again in multiple lab exercises. Repetition can be useful, but I hate repetition in a textbook. It’s a book, after all. The words aren't going anywhere.  I can go back and reread sections if I need to. I don’t want to read the same information twice unless it was my choice to go back and reread it.

In other situations, I had the exact opposite complaint.  The exercises were laid out in a relatively logical progression, but sometimes they presented new syntaxes or concepts in an example without any explanations of those concepts until after the example.  I prefer to have things explained before I see the examples. The lab-based format of this textbook meant that things were often presented the other way around – first the example in the exercise, then the explanation contained within the answer to the exercise.  This often forced me to go back and re-read the exercise in light of the new information I had just read. I felt like this format was less efficient than a traditional textbook format because I spent more time flipping backwards and re-reading than I normally do.

I’m willing to put in the time to read and understand material about a difficult subject, and I like to be challenged, but I get frustrated if something is more complicated and time-consuming than it needs to be. Especially if, like PL/SQL, it really isn't a difficult subject.  If a person has any aptitude for programming at all, this book will be more than sufficient to teach them what they need to know. I just personally would have preferred a more linear, traditional textbook format.