In a nutshell: While helpful in learning the basics of SystemC, the book leaves a lot of questions in the reader's mind.



The book does a good job touching on syntax, important SystemC classes, and usage semantics (how modules are connected to other objects.) Unfortunately, like other readers have already commented, the code-listings in the book are heavily trimmed -- many leave out declarations and other critical code to actually the thing to work. It's hard to strike a balance between code-brevity and excessive verbosity. On the plus side, all code-snippets in the book are downloadable (in COMPLETE form) from the publisher's website -- it's a shame the author didn't put a complete code-listing in the book, every now and then, just to help novice C++ readers.



This brings me to my major criticism of the book. The author has a habit of explaining away many topics in terms of C++ and terminology. You'll need an ADVANCED background in C++ and a working knowledge in OOP (object-oriented programming.) For readers lacking that background, the explanations and arugments sound like magical hand-waving arguments.



To be fair, the inner-workings of the SystemC library use extremely advanced C++ techniques. The SystemC library hides some of this complexity, but shoehorning a concurrent/hardware-simulation language on top of the C++ programming language is no easy feat. Consequently, the book cannot avoid bringing in a lot of C++ details about SystemC's implementation.