The author presents overviews of the major characteristics of several microcomputer busses and compares their features. He also discusses several topics concerning the design of busses and covers boards used with two of the busses.

The book discusses Multibus I, Multibus II, VMEbus, NuBus, PC/XA/AT bus, and STD bus. Fairly detailed design examples are given for Multibus I and VMEbus. The discussion is sufficient to enable an engineer to select a bus for a system being designed, but the book is not intended to serve as a design reference. In addition to the specific examples, tutorials address basic concepts, software/hardware interactions, and transmission-line concepts. The book also includes discussions of programmable logic devices and field-programmable gate arrays.

The author notes that it is not practical to cover all possible busses in a book of this type. Nonetheless, since the book includes the PC/XT/AT bus, the value of that discussion would have been considerably enhanced by at least a brief description of its two 32-bit successors, the extended industry standard architecture (EISA) bus and the IBM MicroChannel bus.

This book should be useful to an engineer who is making a decision on a bus for a system. It is also suitable for use in a course on fundamentals of computer busses and I/O, as a supplement to a basic textbook on these subjects.