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Title: Efficient Memory Programming by David Loshin ISBN: 0-07-038868-7 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Pub. Date: 25 November, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $50.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Lots of theoretical material with little practical value.
Comment: This book is academic in nature. The material is well structured and explained in the way that is similar to advanced college writings. It gives pretty good overview of the hardware memory organization, principles of operation, and extensive overview of optimization techniques primarily targeted at people looking for general knowledge in that field but without much desire to get into details. Due to the good structural and logical organization this book is a perfect material to base an advanced computer science course on.

But! If you're looking for examples of practical use (and abuse) of memory to dramatically boost the performance of your application, the book holds little or no value for you. Starting from the fact that it only briefly describes the internals of PII processor and it has nothing on PIII, PIV and AMD Athlon principles of operating with memory and finishing with code examples which are very simplistic and impossible to take advantage of.

If you're into real-world memory "hacking" and not the academic stuff take a look at "Code optimization: effective memory usage" by Kris Kaspersky.

Rating: 4
Summary: Good content, difficult reading
Comment: A very good book, unfortunately marred by the author's total lack of writing ability. You will have to BELABOUR this book, which is a shame because the author clearly is an expert on the technical side; it's a shame no one bothered to make it borderline readable as far as both writing style and structure.

Rating: 3
Summary: It contains some valuable insights, but lack the details
Comment: This is my first book on efficient programming technique. The book offers brief description on how different kinds of memories are organized (specifically, cache and virtual memory). In addition, it breifly introduces data dependencies analysis (which is what I was looking for).

The book does not offer detail enough information on how to do the analysis. Also, the examples in the book are too simple to be applied to real-life problem.

I was especially disappointed by the content of chapter 10(the chapter on advance optimization). I was expecting something that I could used on my code, but all the chapters talked about was optimization that could only be done by compilers.

In conclusion, I think this book is only good for beginners (like me :) who can benefit from some basic ideas on how cache and virtual memory operates and on how the compiler performs some of the optimizations.