Covering a broad range of hardware and software technology, this fully integrated text provides a technical foundation for systems design, hardware and software procurement, and management of computing resources.
Currently an IS major, read this for my Software & Hardware concepts class. Utterly disappointed. I spent more time looking at external resources on the web and youtube videos that helped me gage the concepts better than this book ever did. The chapters are long-winded. The images/pictures in the book are muddled and confusing comprehend. Doesn’t really help you understand the inner workings of a computer. Each chapter is about 30-40 pages long, so we're talking over 400 pages of text that could have been pared down to 1/2 that, yet still wasn't clear enough. Do not take a professor who only uses this book to teach. Luckily my professor actually knew his stuff and was kind and patient with all of us, and spent 50/50 time on the book and lectures. But this book will not make you a computer prodigy. On the contrary, you'll be spending more time using outside resources to break down the mess of a book this is.
Without good lectures by my professor, this textbook was not really good one. Writing was often not clear enough and hit the very narrow range, not for a beginner but not for an intermediate either. At least, that's what I felt.