Embedded Books

I bought this book because it was the only one on the shelf, despite the rating the other reviewer gave it. Baaaad choice. This book is useless. I'm a new developer to embedded processors (specifically, the 8051), and I got absoutly nothing out of this book. It seems like a bunch of filler material crammed together. Very little substance. This is a book worth $5 if you have never done binary math and don't know what a pointer is. Everything the other reviewer said was correct. How is this publisher selling something like this?

Am I bitter?

The book is like a catalog of Newnes' embedded series. Content of each of the chapters is basically taken from Newnes book. For example,Chapter 2 Device Drivers is taken from the book "Embedded Systems Architecture" and Chapter 7 Techniques for Embedded Media Processing is taken from "Embedded Media Processing". Well, it is not difficult to guess which books they were taken from, as the books are shown on the page on the back of the front page.

Alright, so what is the consequence of different writers writing on different topics without knowing what others were writing? The result is, a lot of inconsistency and yet overlapping between chapters. The wide range of microprocessor examples used in this books includes Rabbit, TI DSP, Freescale. However, many common topics such as code optimization, real time system appear in 2 or more chapters. I quickly ran through the table of content and found MMU in Chapter 3 and 5, Code optimization in Chapter 7,8 and 9.

If you are a fans of Newnes embedded series, or would like to find out what is this like, then maybe this is the book for you.

Barely scratches the surface of the content implied by the title. This book contains far too much introductory material aimed at an audience of neophytes. A great deal of the practical information in the book can be obtained gratis from the application notes available from the manufacturer. A real dissappointment.

I've been a hardware engineer for six years and have seen many of my designs vanish into firmware. It was time to learn how to program a microcontroller, but this book was not much help.

The index often points to the wrong page - close, but usually a page or two off. There are no appendixes for quick reference. The illustrations vaguely correlate to the text.

The chapter on the assembly language begins: "This book is not intended to be a manual on programming.." and it truly does not teach assembly. There are several example codes with virtually no explanation and there are no programs with which to practise.

Much of the chapter on the microcontroller (68hc11 used as the basis) talks about component placement on the PCB or noise, which is nice to know but not fundamental in learning how to program the chip. The rest of this chapter is a gloss over which concludes: "Although the reader may never program or design a microcontroller system..." Then why am I reading it? Well, you might read it if you worked WITH a microcontroller engineer but were NOT a microcontroller engineer and never intended to become one.

There are enough buzz words in here to make you sound good, but if you really want to learn the 68hc11, find another book.

One doesn't normally expect a technical book to be more than passibly readable, and this slim book is no exception. However, even books with a stiff style, grammatical errors, and blantant proofreading slips can be forgiven when one gets to the technical information. And that, sadly, is what this book is missing. Although there are some schematics, and an OK, if greatly abbreviated discussion of A/D operation and usage, the book simply lacks any significant punch. And then there are the errors. Just looking through the first chapter I spotted several. In one, a pin on the 8051 is mislabled as an output, and then referred to in the text as an input. Do you suppose that might confuse someone? Or the references to entries in a table which do not exist? The table is there, but the entries in question are not. Perhaps this book could have been saved by including some data sheets from Intel or Philips. Perhaps a discussion of timer operation would have helped, if it had turned out to be any more than just a rehash of the timer register descriptions from the data sheets. Well, that's the bottom line here, actually. This book doesn't have anything you can't get from the manufacturers, personal web pages, and even a pretty good FAQ. Get the Intel, Philips, and Dallas Semicondutor PDF files (8051 Programmer's Guide, datasheets, etc.) and you will have more information than can be found in this book, and it will be better written, too. And the best part is that the stuff from the manufacturers is free.

There is nothing to review as the document is just a outline of what the book contains. I wouldn't be so disappointed if the title had specified this.

The three sentence review itself was not very helpful.

I think the title of my review says it all.

If you want a GREAT book on programming microcontrollers in C, look at
Programming 16-Bit PIC Microcontrollers in C, or Programming 32-bit Microcontrollers in C.

after reading this book,i got a thorough grounding in memory issues associated with embedded systems on chip

Dear Sir.

I'm sure that those five authors are very experinced and are very skilled. But this book hasn't shown any of this. After reading nearly sixty pages it becomes clear that the price and content of this book if for making some people more wealthier! Let me demonstrate with a few examples.

The authors states that the future is bright and the semiconductor and embedded industry will flourish growth. True, but we have a global recession in the world right now - not when the book was written.

They have given "prictical circuit diagrams and complete C code with 33 case studies...". True, and they have skipped flow charts to keep book short. And skipped comments on the C-code - NOT very wise...

On page 32 there's a MCU for controlling two seven-segments. BUT there's only code for the output to the segment and not for controlling the two transistors which controls each segment. How do you control each transistor - Magic ?

On page 41 there's a MCU with one end of a push button to the MCU. OK, from the other end of the push button it goes directly to ground - and from ground to a resistor to Vcc. Eh, this will NEVER work!

On page 62 there's a schematic of a PID temperature controller. And on page 63 there are some notes on PID theory. And after the notes there are nearly six pages of code for the PID schematic. And NO comments on the code? What's the big idea ? Reverse engineering for the fun of it?

I know that you wrote that you would keep the book "hands on Approach", but after all the reading and quotes from Aristotle and McKeachie and Rohn it's quite obvious that you're only in it for the m....!

:o( And now I'm going to sell my book, hopes this gives me just some of the money back ?

I bought this book a week ago and from the time i have opened it and read it till now (a week after) it did not give me anything useful at all! The book is full of source code lines which are actually useless because they do not compile in the first place. Second, the code is commented very very badly.
I would not suggest to anyone to buy this book. It IS A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY!
There are other much much better books out there for embedded programming.

I've worked on SoC's and do not consider myself an expert but this book is not worth the money. From the title you would expect this book to be about design and test of SoC's. The author does not present any new or insightful design techniques or testing strategys that a person who has designed an ASIC before does not know. He covers basic rules in very general terms with out real specific details. The books seem to be just an ad-hoc hodge podge of every day asic guidelines that are summerized in 200+ pages. Even if you have never designed an ASIC before this book would not help you it is way to general and very vague. I would invest in talking to an ASIC designer in one's company. This books is not worth the money even for the new ASIC designer.

This article is very light on content. It does not explain anything in depth. I would not recommend it.