Solid book, not for self-taught

This book is an excellent companion to computer science/computer engineering classes. It tends to be fairly short and concise for almost every topic, which is why I would only recommend this book to those who really need it (required). Without guidance the concepts of digital design, especially as presented here, will no doubt escape people quickly. There is a couple errors in the book, which can be expected when they have to include data from external sources such as block diagrams for integrated circuits. If you need this book for a college CS/CE/EE intro course no doubt the book, you, and your professor will have alot of fun with some basic computer engineering and labs, BUT, as a self-study or reference, I do not recommend, at all. I have used this book for a computer science course at MN State, and while everything has gone very smoothly, it's only because collaboration with a professor has smoothed out the bumps and even filled in minor gaps or shown alternate methods.

Better than his other one.

In first year engineering at Simon Fraser University, many of my classmates and I absolutely hated Mano's other text, "Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals (2nd ed. updated)". However since I have picked this text up I have found Mano to be much easier to read, but that could be because I have adjusted to the material and his writing style.

Unfortunately there are no solutions to any of the exercises in this text, only selected answers. His other text has some solutions posted on the companion site (http://www.prenhall.com/mano/), you may be able to use them to learn from with this text as well.

And there are little mistakes in the text that may make things difficult to understand at first, but I did find a decent errata on the web (http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~amirali/courses/CENG290/textmistakes.html).

I don't know how good the text is for self-teaching, but it isn't bad for brushing up on the basics after being away from digital design for a couple years.

A good guide to "classic" digital design

This book gives a good coverage of digital design. It includes:The basics (binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers, two's complement); boolean algebra and its relationship to logic gates; symplification of Boolean functions and NAND/NOR implementation; adders (half, full, carry lookahead, parity generation) and encoders/decoders; PLD's; synchronous design: state machines, counters, shift registers; asynchronous design (race conditions, hazards), characteristics of digital integrated circuits (TTL, ECL, CMOS) and a bunch of proposed lab experiments.I found the book to be plenty of information relative to its size. The issues are presented clearly, and I didn't find any bugs in the book. Some of the data presented (like asynchronous design) are difficult to find in other reference books.However, I was not sure if it deserved the 5 stars. The book doesn't cover today's hot issues like low voltage families (3.3V and below), and it also does not have any reference to HDL (Verilog, VHDL). The presented PLD's and logic families are today almost obsolete.But all in all, it is an excelente reference on digital design.