Customer Reviews

ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the ARM tradition of charging for everything, the firmware guide by Sloss is easy to read, and comprehensive up to ARM10/StrongARM XScale/926/940. That said, the book looks like the notes from a firmware lecture delivered by an Arm Apps engineer. The book is strongest in coverage of MMU and cache, but weak on ARM11 (1136 only and as a final chapter) and essentially non-existent in Jazelle coverage. Nice features are the toy RTOS which appears early at reappears with more features (memory protection, and MMU, for example). That this book is so quickly out of date brings the point that MDR bulleted last year, that the ARM family needs birth control but that is a topic for another discussion. Sloss' book has 'non-commercial license' for all the sourcecode. huh? Regarding this book, Freescale for example publishes equivalent information (old ESS manuals) in the 860/8260 training manuals for free, on their website. If your company pays for your books, by all means have them get the sloss book for you it makes a great read on the john, but if you are a student or independent developer, you would be as well served by studying the ARM ARM and applicable ARM source code for U-Boot, Redboot and the L4 microkernel, or even Ed Sutter's book, with the added benefit that you would have a license to use the code in your project.

There are many books on ARM's architecture or manual references. So far, this book is the only book which concentrates on the firmware development side. Both assembly language and C are discussed, which is a relief for embedded/firmware engineers like me who like to combine both languages in a project.
The 15 chapters in the book are:
1- ARM Embedded Systems
2- ARM Processor Fundamentals
3- Introduction to the ARM instruction set
4- Introduction to the Thumb instruction set
5- Efficient C Programming
6- Writing and Optimizing ARM assembly code
7- Optimized Primitives
8- Digital Signal Processing
9- Exception and Interrupt Handling
10- Firmware
11- Embedded Operating Systems
12- Cache
13- Memory Protection Units
14- Memory Management Units
15- The Future of the Architecture
The strength of this book lies on the extensive examples on how to program ARM effectively. It is a nice guide for those who want to learn ARM programming style.

This book covers many aspects of programming the ARM familiy, including a surprisingly thorough discussion on fixed-point DSP computation.

Having come from another architecture, this book really got me going on ARM. It complements the documentation manufacturers usually provide for their ARM chips in that it covers the ARM core much more in-depth.

The book discusses everything from register usage to memory management units. If you want to become an expert programmer in C/Assembly on ARM systems, you must buy this book.

Also included is a nice comparison of the ARM and Gnu assembler directives, which came in handy when I converted an ARM assembly file to the Gnu syntax.

Whether you're developing a small automotive application runned ARM7 or working on a real-time or timeshared operating system involving ARM platform this book is definitely a must-have desk guide. In this book you'll find a thorough description of modern ARM cores and their differences, hints and tips on managing caches and TLB mappings, working with MMU and MPU, handling exceptions and keeping the pipeline loaded by writing effective code. The book also covers ARM DSP extensions, THUMB instruction set and gives a handy list of heavily optimized primitives for common operations like arithmetics, bit operations and random numbers generation.

The authors have done a wonderful job of taking something complicated and making it very simple, without dumbing it down. They explain why and how, and the material is well organized. There are useful reference tables scattered throughout. There is no attempt at humor, and I'm grateful for it.

Highlights include discussions about registers, Arm multiple load/store instructions, the Arm function calling convention, tactics for writing fast C and assembler, DSP implementation, memory management, and assembler code for things like division. The chapters on firmware and basic OS implementation each show a simple yet functional implementation.

My only complaint is that there's nothing practical in here about IO, not even JTAG. The authors have limited themselves to the ARM core only, perhaps because there are many differences between the microprocessors that use it. This makes the title a bit misleading - in my view a System Developer's Guide should have enough information so that you can at least write a "Hello World" program of some sort, even if it doesn't work on everybody's hardware.

So to do anything practical, you'll have to track down a lot more documentation for your specific microcontroller. Still, five stars for the clear, detailed information on the topics it does cover. I will certainly be using it as a reference.

Simply put, this is the must-have-book for any ARM programmer as I think this is the best or perhaps the only useful book of its kind available.

I like the chapter "Efficient C Programming" that tells you how to optimize your code in general and specifically for ARM architecture. However, I do not like the idea of making some complicated tricks in assembly language just to get rid of one instruction in a function. The working assembly code optimized for mathematics calculation and signal processing application could be valuable for those pursuing high computation power. The explanation of cache and MMU are very detailed and clear. Whereas the walkthrough on assembly language is quite an easy one.

However, it is quite a shame that less focus has been given to some general but essential features such as exception handling, bootloading and real time operating system. There was little or no word on the compilation, linking, tools, simulator which will be of great help for the user to kickstart an ARM project.

Some complained the lacking of information in ARM11 and later processor, well, that is reasonable if you take a look at the publishing date. Anyway, the content of this book is still relevant and useful for many ARM7/9-powered microprocessor being used in the market.

This is the best book I've seen for the ARM series of processors. I have developed with many processors, on and off the Job and am now planning to develop for the ARM7 and ARM9 processors; particularly the AT91 and the AT91SAM7 series of processors by ATMEL. Base on the processors' hardware specs they are perfect for the small time developer. But, when looking the ARM's instruction set, it appears that programming them requires a steep learning curve.

This book will easily reduce my learning curve, at the very least, by more than half. It is clear, comprehensive, and to the point.

In a world that has strict requiresments on performance, power, as well as development time, a developer has to ARM himself. This book will show you how to do just that.

As a developer of embedded systems, most of which are on ARM platforms, this book has pulled me out of trouble more than once.
Very helpful!

The book is very well written and the language is easy to understand, as long as you have some basic knowledge about assembly language and C programming.

This book covers all necessary topics to know ARM evolution, general ARM architecture organisation and ARM programming.

Also, introduces to Thumb architecture, but it doesn't touch the Cortex family (as expected, since Cortex is a recent architecture).

Written in a mid-tecnhical style, it's recommended to have ARM specific data sheet and ARM instruction set to know specific details about the ARM processor used.