I am planning to go through this book later this year. Can you help me understand what the difference is between this and Hennessey Patterson's book Computer Organization and Architecture? Like, why would/should I study x86_64/ARM/RISC V/MIPS/anything else? Is there a difference in approach or the architecture?
They are complementary and not the same. I very highly recommend that you get and study "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3rd edition" since it is a very practical and detail oriented book(i.e. no hand-waving and full of code for x86-64) for the Programmer. Hennessy & Patterson's "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" is more high-level with not enough depth while their "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is full on theory book.
