The versatile offspring of an extended family of multiple chip companies, today\'s MIPS chips are everywhere. They power everything from video games, network routers, laser printers, and set-top boxes, to high-performance workstations. This book brings together this extraordinary proliferation of form and functionality, offering embedded systems programmers and designers unique, eminently practical insights into MIPS. It covers how MIPS started, the principles at the root of the RISC revolution, the full details of the MIPS instruction set, and how these details together constitute a full operating system ready to be put to work in hundreds of ways.