See my history of reviews. I have read many CS texts in my life, only some of which I have reviewed here, but basically, I am not impressed by the huge majority of books about technical topics.This is one of the good ones. No nonsense, concise, deep enough. In other words, not a waste of time, again like so many CS texts are.If I had to gripe... the authors begin to trail off at the end of each chapter into less important topics. You can feel the invisible hand of the publisher asking for more content. No author for these publishers escapes this entirely. When you begin to feel like you are reading about a niche topic, abruptly skip to the next chapter- the chapters never recover once they begin to trail off. But this is still only the very end of most of the chapters, there is still 90% gold in this book.This is one of the best books about tech I have ever read. I desperately wish more were like it.