This is a great intro book. Coming out of high school and having only programmed in C++, it was really useful as an overview of what is really going on inside a computer. It's a concepts-only book though; the assembly language and architecture are not used in the real world. I took Patt's classes as well. They made all my other classes seem boring and terse in comparison - he really makes you think. His teaching style was very polarizing though. Other useful books: Hennessey and Patterson's Computer Architecture, Raymond's Art of Unix Programming, Rochkind's Advanced Unix Programming

Commerce is founded on supply and demand. Piracy has become a leading indicator of what people demand before it is available through legal channels. Downloading movies illegally was a precursor to Netflix, and was instrumental in it's creation. If there is something you want, be it the object itself or the method most convenient for you to digest it, that you cannot pay someone to obtain and poses no threat to anyone at all really, by all means go for it. If nothing else maybe you'll convince a publisher to reprint the book and sell an electronic version. It is their loss for not seeing the opportunity.