1. Discuss buses, which are sets of wires that move data, addresses and control signals from one part of the computer to another.
2. Learn how time multiplexing is used to cut down on the number of wires in a bus.
3. Distinguish between serial and parallel buses.
4. Discuss how bus architectures are open or closed and what that means for vendors.
5. Learn how various components need to take control of the bus from time to time; learn the terms bus master and bus slave.
6. Learn about the arbiter and how it decides who will be the bus master.
7. Go through some bus transactions.
8. Talk about the tricky issue of timing the signals on a bus.
9. Differentiate between synchronous and asynchronous buses.

This chapter is pretty self-contained, although it helps to know the main components of a CPU, namely registers and main memory. This information is found in chapters 7 and 8.