Reviews for Introduction to Reconfigurable Supercomputing (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture)

The average rating for Introduction to Reconfigurable Supercomputing (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-11 00:00:00 John Roberts Don't believe that this book is written like a museum placard? Try this sample paragraph: A T-shaped court square is constructed in front of the Heavenly Gate, with palace walls on the east, west and south sides. There are gateways at the east wing, the west wing and the south end of this enclosed square. The east gateway is called Chang An Zuo Men (the Left Gate of Chang An), the west gateway Chang An You Men (the Right Gate of Chang An), and the south gateway Da Ming Men (the Great Ming Gate, changed into Da Qing Men, the Great Qing Gate in the Qing Dynasty and then into Gate of China - the Gate of China in the period of Republic of China, and then later removed). To the south of the Great Ming Gate is the main gate of the inner city of Beijing, which is called Zheng Yang Men (the Due South Gate) and what is known today as Qian Men (the Front Gate) at the south side of Tiananmen Square. The whole book is written like that. Sure, there is a lot of information in that paragraph... but it isn't the kind of writing any normal person would want to read.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-03-08 00:00:00 Robert Davis There are some good observations about writing here, but the presentation is rather disjointed--Vandenburgh admits to having trouble organizing her thoughts in the acknowledgements. She goes about drafting novels in a very free-form, unstructured way (nothing wrong with that!), but I think this approach works against her in a non-fiction book about writing. My biggest barrier to gleaning information from this book is the fact that nearly half of it is an extended encyclopedia of writing terms. There are some standards here, like "conflict", "empathy", and "evil", but also invented terms and phrases I wouldn't have known to look up, such as "the way we name a river" (under W) and "your story's needs" (under Y). This forces you to read the encyclopedia chronologically--I noticed terms are re-referenced only in later sections, which seems to confirm my decision to read this way--and yet, reading an encyclopedia like this can be downright dull. There are some great little gems hidden in here (I liked "revelation" and "fairy tale"), but I found it hard to retain the disjointed, alphabetical list. Some definitions are lengthy, spreading over multiple paragraphs or pages, while others are overly vague and much too short. I think it would be more beneficial to read the books referenced here instead: Wood's "How Fiction Works", Lamott's "Bird by Bird", King's "On Writing", Forrester's "Aspects of the Novel".