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Title:
PC Interfacing, Communications and Windows Programming
Author:
Buchanan
ISBN:
0 201 17818 4
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley
Pages:
670pp
Price:
£27-95
Reviewer:
Brian Bramer
Subject:
internals and hardware
Appeared in:
11-3
This text deals mainly with PC architecture and programming. In
essence it is in eight parts (1) PC evolution from the 8086 to the Pentium
II, the instruction set/memory addressing, the chipset (8250 UART, 8259 PIC,
8255 PPI, 8254 PTC) and the interrupt system and the BIOS. (2) buses (ISA,
MCA, VESA, PCI, IDE, SCSI, etc.) together with a breakdown of a Pentium
motherboard. (3) serial and parallel ports (including interrupt programming
under DOS). (4) Visual Basic programming. (5) Architecture of the Windows
operating system (drivers, file system, processes management, etc.) (6)
Win32 programming. (7) Networking overview with TCP/IP and Ethernet in some
detail. (8) Java programming.
As one can see this covers a lot of PC related topics from basic hardware
and interfacing to programming in VB and Java. It is well organised and
readable with plenty of sample code (assembler, C, VB and Java) and good
explanations. Too specialised to be a set book for a module on computer
architecture (fundamentals of architecture are not covered in detail and
there is more to computers than the PC - the architecture of which is really
a cobbled together mess). Insufficient detail for an engineer developing PC
hardware and the VB and Java only introductory overviews. However, a useful
reference to the PC and worth considering by anyone who wishes to get an
overview of the PC or needs to interface to the hardware (e.g. serial or
parallel ports) and then write application programs.