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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Experience From One Who Has Been There, August 25, 2000
This review is from: The Art of Designing Embedded Systems (Edn Series for Design Engineers) (Hardcover)
In Mr. Ganssle's book he states, "Engineers are notoriously poor communicators..." and some of that truth shows in his book. The chapters, sections, and appendices are well organized but the content in them is not. The writing style has a tendency to ramble like a friendly conversation, sometimes deviating into tangential material. However, the experience and wisdom held in the book's content (even the tangential parts) are its greatest prize. As an embedded developer with seven years of experience, I found myself frequently relating to the author's own experience. When I read the sentence, "We've got to avoid quoting a long, arbitrary time impact as a knee-jerk reaction to any change request." I actually laughed out loud. Mr. Ganssle does a good job of contrasting a disciplined, well-documented development process versus a panicked, haphazard one and he explains the trade-offs between the two by quoting respectable studies on the subject. The material on writing and debugging good embedded code is all stuff that most folks will, hopefully, learn after few years on the job. But, if you're just starting out, or if you're looking for a better way to do your job, I recommend that you read this book.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Embedded Systems Guru Knowledge Base, May 18, 2000
This review is from: The Art of Designing Embedded Systems (Edn Series for Design Engineers) (Hardcover)
This text is obviously a distillation of many years of experience in the field. I have programmed enough ISR's and programmable devices to know that it is very good advise indeed. The book, however, is not for the beginner. His assumed audience are people who are already in the field and would like to take advantage someone with greater experience. The book is loaded with hard learned nuggets of wisdom that are less likely to be found in classroom textbooks. He has something to offer both software and hardware types(I'm software). For example, the advise about software partitioning, ISR development and debugging, and device programming is excellent, and for hardware types the advise on building boards that are both software and hardware debuggable and the myriad tips on finding problems from the common to the obscure will be appreciated. He also provides suggested project management guidelines that help in getting functionality operating as quickly as possible, and, from my point of view, guidance on how to deal with irrational schedules and managements that are reluctant to provide adequate project resources. I appreciated expecially his citing research that quiet private offices provide the single greatest boost to engineering productivity. Probably the only thing I found lacking in the book was a Bibliography of other book references and useful web links.
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39 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Hunter S. Thompson has written an Embedded Systems Book!, January 4, 2000
This review is from: The Art of Designing Embedded Systems (Edn Series for Design Engineers) (Hardcover)
This is a really poorly written and poorly organized collection of ramblings from an embedded systems "expert." Each topic is covered at a grossly superficial level and most sections consist of short random thoughts. Here's a typical paragraph (from the 2 pages on real time operating systems). "Improvements to these tools come almost daily. Keep on top of the field to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs." Speaking of dinosaurs, the author's favorite tool for debugging and performance analysis seems to be the oscilloscope. I get the feeling that the author "wrote" this book by talking into a tape recorder while in an LSD haze on the way to Las Vegas. BTW, the page count is 243 and not 352 claimed in the advertising for this book. Thankfully, the editors saw fit to trash at least a portion of this book. My only regret in writing this review is that the Amazon rating service doesn't offer the option of giving 0 stars.
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