Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to the ARM Cortex-M3 (Embedded Technology)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased this book despite at least one scathing reviewer's criticism. The Author states specifically in the preface, "This book is intended to be a lighter read for programmers, embedded product designers, System-on-a-Chip (SOC) engineers, electronics enthusiasts, academic researchers, and others with some experience of microcontrollers or microprocessors who are investigating the Cortex-M3 processor." I interpret that to mean the book has a wide audience in mind, some with less experience than others. That said, I found this book to be on par with those written by various authors for the Newness series on Microchips products

The book has a good overview of the architecture without focusing on any one vendor's implementation. However, I felt that I would have liked to see a brief comparison of some of the various vendor offerings and what the key architectural components were implemented or left out. It can be argued that a vendor data sheet is the appropriate place for such information; just be aware this book is a general survey. The discussion in the back of the book on the Keil and GNU tool chains turned out to be non-essential for myself as I am using IAR's tool chain. Your mileage may vary.

Reason's to purchase this book, in my opinion, are to understand some of the background of the ARM architecture (not a complete review, but enough to understand where the Coretex-M3 fits in to the rest of the ARM series and the odd nomenclature of the ARM series) as well as an overview of how the architecture is put together. Then, a specific vendor's implementation of the ARMv7 can be pursued with a better understanding of what the vendor has implemented and how to use the implementation.

(Added 1/20/2009)
Note that with the introduction of Atmel's Cortex M3 product line, the popularity of the Luminary/TI Cortex M3 series, and others, this book is one of the few or, perhaps the only, books on the market that helps individuals new to the Cortex M3 get up to speed on the architecture and programming of the Cortex M3.

I just recieved this book. This is the book you need if you are going to be doing any sort of serious programming for the Arm Cortex M3 processor. I was reluctant to purchase it because of some of the bad reviews that it recieved. But it does cover a lot of the details of how the hardware functions and programming at the assembly level, which seems to be almost imposible to find anywhere else. I am very happy with this book (I am a long time...30+years micro controller programmer).

I just finished reading and rereading this book. I wish I had a book like this when I started out programming the Atmel AVR-chips. It took me half a year to grasp that platform the way I did the Cortex-M3 after five hours with this book. It is one of the most pleasant to-the-metal hardware descriptions I have read. Yiu has an intimate knowledge of the Cortex-M3-design and shares not only the facts of the matter, but also convey the intentions behind the design choices.

For the casual microcontroller hacker this book might be entertaining overkill - but if you are developing timing-critical applications and feel the need to really grasp the core before pushing it to the limit - this is the book to read.

Well, I received the book, and returned it the next day. In my opinion, the book is not worth the $55. I can find all this info from the data sheet (I'm using the STM32 product line and their 1000+ page data sheet covers it all)...

Said that, the book does cover a great deal, but again, not worth the high price.

I found the this book to be less than what I had hoped.
My preference would have been for a book that took a more hands on approach to device programming
specifics and peripheral usage and less discussion of the obscure details of the M3.
There is no mention of how to use the ADC for example.
The Lucio Di Jasio books on dsPIC and PIC32 are a good example of the format style I would
like to see for a book on the M3. Concrete and useful examples that get the user up and running and
building projects rather than clouding the readers head with information they may never need to know.
I found this book discouraged me from using the M3 more than it informed.

Piker

This is documentation that ARM should be giving away free, not selling.

I say this because:

1) There is too much concern with prior ARM processors. Historical information is nice, and may be appropriate for an Appendix, but does not contribute to understanding the Cortex-M3.

2) I really don't care what instructions are NOT implemented. I'm concerned with what IS implemented.

3) There is too much ARM marketing hype. The Cortex-M3 is not as wiz-bang great as the book might have you believe.

4) The author fails to define terms prior to use, like Jazelle. It's obviously some feature of OTHER processors by ARM, but by no means is it an industry standard name and so must be defined before use.

Information normally expected, especially for embedded processors, like the number of clocks per instruction is not provided.

Although I use these processors, I really don't see what's so special about the processor. <GF>

A very well written book on the ARM Cortex-M3. I found the description of CMSIS (Cortex Microcontroller Sytem Interface Standard) very helpful. The CMSIS is attempting to provide a consistent interface to access the processor across different families. For example, accessing the Nested Vector Interrupt Controller is described using CMSIS functions. Also, the NVIC is well described in this book. Other things I found helpful were using bit-banding as a semaphore implementation and the startup sequence of the M3 (first set the stack, then the reset vector).
The book doesn't cover peripherals (like timer/counter or IO lines) since these vary from on manufacturer to another.
One of the critical reviews I read on this book complained that this information can or should be obtained from the data sheets. I've been pouring over the 1100+ pages of the Atmel SAM3S part and it is not nearly as well written as this book. Also, a lot of the data sheet covers peripheral user interface functions (i.e. the registers used to program the peripherals).
This book is half the length of the Atmel data sheet and probably packs in twice the useful information.
Highly recommend if you're in this field.

This book seems to have been edited by a script kiddie who appearantly decided that the writer should cover everything he didn't understand himself. If you don't know how a stack works and what its purpose is then you need a general introduction into microprocessor architecture and leave the grown-up stuff for later. Especially because if you still need these things explained to you the glaring mistakes in this book will only confuse you. Truly embarrassing is a superfluous aside which attempts to explain the difference between bit banding and bit banging and immediately mistypes the latter (page 92).
If you are looking for a comprehensive book explaining what the Cortex-M3 architecture has to offer and what distinguishes it from other architectures then look elsewhere.

You may be dissapointed if you are a firmware programmer wanting to learn how to program the ARM Cortext-M3. This book explains only the internal of processor core, not a complete microcontroller with peripherals such as UART. From a high level language (C/C++) perspective, unless you are a compiler designer or assembler programmer, otherwise you probably need not to worry about the details of processor's internal operations and registers.

This book may only be useful 'but i'm unsure) for SoC designer and compiler engineer. For ARM processor user, my advice is to read the white paper from ARM to understand the new features of Cortex-M3, and refer to the sample codes of real processor (eg from ST) that can be found in ARM's firmware development suite.

I am new to ARM programming but this book left me with more questions than answers when it comes to low level hardware initialization/configuration/interaction. However, as far as I can tell there is not much else out there becides the ARM user and reff manuals.