B74-40 Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design

This book is an introduction to the design of digital systems. It is intended as a one semester course for electrical engineering or computer science students and assumes only a minimal background in programming, binary numbers, and Boolean algebra. The intended level of the course is never mentioned. The major goal of the book is to "....involve the student in the design process...". The vehicle for this involvement is a register transfer (RT) language. Statements in the language are shown to be readily translated into hardware. Thus once the RT language description is formulated the hardware design is essentially complete. Also, as a matter of course specific systems are designed in the RT language before generalizations are made. Unfortunately the RT language and the specific to general approach (both of which the reviewer views as good techniques) lead to the major weaknesses of the book.