I guess it all depends on what side you're coming from. When I was in school, I studied MIPS from the perspective of a compiler writer who's only casually inter

I guess it all depends on what side you're coming from. When I was in school, I studied MIPS from the perspective of a compiler writer who's only casually interested in hardware design. Having learned a couple of CISC designs beforehand, I found MIPS to be absolutely genius in comparison. I wasn't interested so much in implementing a MIPS processor, just coding for it.