Verilog HDL (2nd Edition),   ISBN:9780130449115

Customer Rating: 

I've used this book for four weeks now and it does a good job with the basics but it often say don't mind this part we'll explain it later. The index isn't very good when you just want to know where in the book something is. With that said, good beginners school book, but OK reference book.

Customer Rating: 

As a first book on Verilog this is not a good book. I could not find any thing I was looking for in the index. There is only about a quarter of a page on memories and only a four line example. Most of the examples were poor and incomplete. This book is not for beginners. I found about four other books that were good references, such as A Verilog HDL Primer, Third Edition by J. Bhasker and Verilog HDL: Digital Design and Modeling by Joseph Cavanagh. Both books have good examples and explanations. If your just starting out buy these two books and not Verilog HDL by Samir Palnitkar.

Customer Rating: 

Here are my complaints with the book:

1. Poor organization -- While it does contain a fairly complete description of Verilog, it's not a very useful description. Reading this book is like reading the Tax Act - all the information is there somewhere, but good luck trying to find it.

2. Poor index -- As a reference, this book is pretty much useless because it lacks a good index. Many items discussed in the book are _not_ in the index. So you can never find that thing that you vaguely remember reading about last month. And you cannot find the answer to a simple question quickly.

3. Lack of practical examples -- For a chip designer or verifier, this book is more or less useless. Although it claims to be "A Guide to Digital Design and Synthesis", there is only one brief chapter on synthesis, and it is severely lacking (a mere 40 pages out of 450). He doesn't even demonstrate how to code a flip-flop with an asynchronous reset. When it comes to practical usage, you're better off searching the web, or reading the source code for the openrisc processor, or something written by an experienced co-worker, or even just reading chapters 11 and 12 of "Application Specific Integrated Circuits" by Michael Smith (also available online I think).

4. Expensive -- I recommend you save your money and just use on-line resources to learn Verilog. None of these on-line resources are great, but at least you will be getting your money's worth, which is more than I can say about this book.

Customer Rating: 

I used this book to learn Verilog and if you read it from beginning to end, you might learn the gist of the language...but that's it. The book is virtually useless as any kind of reference source. The index is almost unusable (if you want to learn about the keywords "fork" or "join", for example, good luck. They aren't even listed in the index, along with just about everything else). Descriptions of how the language works are cryptic and overly brief, though the examples are sometimes helpful.

I seldom write reviews of books, but this one has annoyed me so much that I felt compelled to do so.

All in all, it's better than no book at all, but not much better.

Customer Rating: 

Very comprehensive text about the Verilog language, covering the various aspects of the language. The text is clear and well organized. The exercises at the end of the chapter helped me a lot in the learning process. The simulator included is very simnple and all examples in the book run flawlessly. A few things I did not like: the few mistakes in the text and code could have been easily caught by any careful reviewer, the lack of a more detailed example to show the usage of the various constructs in a real world Verilog design and hints about how to build synthesizable Verilog programs. I have enjoyed the author's style and recommend the book for any person who wants to learn Verilog, including other software engineers like myself who want to understand some HDL basics.