Most of the book is similar to Meyers books. The last chapter is great. I don't know of any other book that presents this information, and this is what programmers screw up most when trying to write high performance code. This chapter discusses how to write extremely tight code considering the actual hardware you're running on (a lot of this is generalizable, since a lot of hardware is similar enough.). Things like writing code to avoid cache misses. Code that pipelines well. Replacing conditionals with small non-conditional code (avoid the branch). Context switching performance, etc.. Basically, this section is what gets you to actually think about the system you're writing software for. The real world, practical reality.



This topic is a must have, especially if you're writing a game engine or physics engine. Anything that needs to be as fast as possible, or faster than the competition... handling loads of data in real time.



I gave the book 3 stars, because I really want a full book on this, not just a short chapter at the end as an afterthought. The authors however do cite 2 other books that they used to write this section, and I'm going to go check them out. As an introduction to hardware-minded performance optimization, this chapter is pretty cool.