1.6 For More Information

No single book can completely cover everything about machine organization that you need to know in order to write great code. This book, therefore, concentrates on those aspects of machine organization that are most pertinent for writing great software, providing the 90 percent solution for those who are interested in writing the best possible code. To learn that last 10 percent of machine organization, you're going to need additional resources.

Learn assembly language. Fluency in at least one assembly language will fill in many missing details that you just won't get by learning machine organization alone. Unless you plan on using assembly language in your software systems, you don't necessarily have to learn assembly language on the platform(s) to which you're targeting your software. Probably your best bet, then, is to learn 80x86 assembly language on a PC. The Intel Architecture isn't the best, but there are lots of great software tools for learning assembly language (for example, the High Level Assembler) that simply don't exist on other platforms. The point of learning assembly language here is not so you can write assembly code, but rather to learn the assembly paradigm. If you know 80x86 assembly language, you'll have a good idea of how other CPUs (such as the PowerPC or the IA-64 family) operate . Of course, if you need to write assembly code, you should learn the assembly language for the CPU you'll be using. An excellent choice for learning assembly language is another book of mine, The Art of Assembly Language , available from No Starch Press.
Study advanced computer architecture. Machine organization is a subset of the study of computer architecture, but space limitations prevent covering machine organization and computer architecture in complete detail within this book. While you may not need to know how to design your own CPUs, studying computer architecture may teach you something you've missed in the presentation of machine organization in this book. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson is a well-respected textbook that covers this subject matter.