ISBN:1565923545Book Description
Embedded software is in almost every electronic device designed today. There is software hidden away inside our watches, microwaves, VCRs, cellular telephones, and pagers; the military uses embedded software to guide smart missiles and detect enemy aircraft; communications satellites, space probes, and modern medicine would be nearly impossible without it. Of course, someone has to write all that software, and there are thousands of computer scientists, electrical engineers, and other professionals who actually do. Each embedded system is unique and highly customized to the application at hand. As a result, embedded systems programming is a widely varying field that can take years to master. However, if you have some programming experience and are familiar with C or C++, you're ready to learn how to write embedded software. The hands-on, no-nonsense style of this book will help you get started by offering practical advice from someone who's been in your shoes and wants to help you learn quickly. The techniques and code examples presented here are directly applicable to real-world embedded software projects of all sorts. Even if you've done some embedded programming before, you'll still benefit from the topics in this book, which include:
- Testing memory chips quickly and efficiently
- Writing and erasing Flash memory
- Verifying nonvolatile memory contents with CRCs
- Interfacing to on-chip and external peripherals
- Device driver design and implementation
- Optimizing embedded software for size and speed
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
Only for beginners
I've been programming embedded systems now for about 5 years and I'm always looking for new tips and tricks. Unfortunately this book is only for beginners. Having said that, it really is a great book for beginners. I'm going to make all of my graduates read this book cover to cover. But if you've been programming embedded systems for anything more than 12 months you probably won't get much out of this book.
Good book if your expectations are right
This is a very well written whirlwind tour of the process of developing embedded systems. But keep in mind, it is extremely superficial. In other words, it's a great introduction for people who have no idea whatsoever what embedded development involves. For anyone who has done some embedded work -- no matter how light -- or even only worked with an embedded group there will be little new here. Someone complained about the old processor selected for demonstration: I don't think it's a significant flaw because the book is not a practical, down-to-the-metal kind of thing anyway, and for a high-level overview, the good old 186 is probably even better because everyone knows it, while the concepts, at that level at least, definitely apply to other platforms. Make sure you know what to expect here, and if your aim is right, you'll like the book. If not, then... well, see reviews below.
If you need something more fundamental, then hit something like Liu, or, going further, Buttazzi, or Kopetz, or similar on the RT side, and, perhaps Ball on the embedded side. If you need a down-to-the-metal book, get Labrosse's uCOS book -- it's clumsily written and printed in huge letters on cardboard-thickness paper, but it comes with the source for a real, full-scale, widely used real-time embedded OS, so you'll be able to dig into the real guts of a real thing with your source code browser; no amount of book-reading will beat that. There's also a rather old but friendly, informative, unpretentious, and detailed book by Walter Heath that I could recommend (if you can get it: it's out of print now; it was published by Van Nostrand Reinolds). It's based on an old Motorola, but so what: even if you don't care for Motorola, the assembly part is readable, and anyway, most of the code is C).
Once you're comfortable on that level, you really don't need any more books, just read other people's code, processor manuals and other vendor literature, and if your OS comes with the source, never neglect to learn it. And if you've never done this kind of work, Barr's book will help you get over the initial fear of unknown and make the first step into that entertaining, ever-changing, and never boring area of computing that real-time embedded development is.