A hands-on view of the highly successful MIPS family of microprocessors, written for programmers developing systems applications for the MIPS platform.

The MIPS Programmer's Handbook describes the MIPS architecture from the perspective of assembly- and C-language programmers, with special emphasis on issues related to embedded applications. Engineers writing system-level programs for MIPS-based embedded systems will find the topic selection especially useful including the sections on software conventions, initializing the processor in a bare machine environment, and writing exception handlers.

For convenient use, the instruction set reference is presented with only one page per instruction. The authors focus on the instructions available to assembly-language programmers, rather than on the hardware-level instruction set documented in data books released by vendors of the MIPS processor. Provides enough detail for anyone doing serious system-level programming. Also included are ten complete program examples, with line-by-line explanations.