Customer Reviews

Embedded Hardware: Know It All (Newnes Know It All)

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I purchased Embedded Hardware because I'm a computer science student and hobbyist who wants to understand more of this stuff.

The first couple chapters which covered the basics were well written and was a refreshing review of the associated topics.

Most of the embedded hardware discussed was embedded processors, the busses in an embedded system, and the different memory types used. These topics take up about 1/3 of the book. The coverage is very complete.

Another huge part of the book talks very in depth about RS-232. It starts with a history lesson, then talks about the standards, and then proceeds to show you how to write your own UART code in Basic, C, and assembly. While this is one topic I'm very comfortable with, I found a lot of the discussion to be long, drawn out, and just plain overkill. The same section covers I2C and SPI and those were done properly. YMMV here.

The book has chapters on interfacing to sensors and goes through a fairly lengthy example of how to check noise related to ADC's.

Last but not least, it has a couple tips chapters which talk about common pitfalls and problems, and talks about PCB design issues... These chapters were well done.

The target audience of this book is definitely professionals that already work in the field. The book has a "business-side" feel to it which discusses things like part cost, IP licensing, relationship with vendors, and so on. The authors do mention hobbyists throughout, but it's usually a passing reference and a "hobbyists can ignore this."-type of message.

Besides the fact that there were like 11 different contributing authors, the book has a consistent writing style and appeared to be well-edited with few gaping mistakes.

The book is relatively new, as of April '08, and has an up to date feel to it. No passing references about a gig of memory being $500 or anything. :)

I found it a relatively easy read although I've got a decent background in computer architecture. I admit I skimmed some of the very detailed processor specifics and some of the memory section. Some of those chapters felt like they were written for reference rather than for a narrative.

Overall, I like the book and would recommend it. Hobbyists will have to filter out some of the unnecessary stuff --- and look elsewhere if they expect coverage of small 8-bit microcontrollers.

This is a great Book. Worth the buy if you wanted to learn how to get working with PIC.

Had I picked this book up from a shelf in a bookstore, I would have flipped through it and put it back. It is full of racked together bits and pieces of things easily found on the net. It isn't really put together in a useful way. I had mistakenly thought it might be a good technical and philosophical guide to embedded layout, organization and basic design ideas. Practical ideas - good ones and bad ones. Its far to basic and just lists stolen information from all over. In a nut shell don't waste your money.....

For an electrical engineer, the book has scads of details about how to use various types of chips, when designing a system like a microprocessor on a motherboard. Typical information includes the differences between NAND and NOR chips. NAND has higher densities than NOR because of a more efficient cell layout method. But NAND tends to have higher bit error rates. And NAND flash chips need a file system, unlike NOR.

Timing analysis gets a good discussion in one chapter. Which also talks about the 3 most common logic families - TTL, NMOS and CMOS. A little surprising for me to see TTL (aka. bipolar) mentioned. These were the first type of transistors I dealt with, but I thought they got phased out years ago. But there are still TTL chips in use. And the TTL-derived logic voltage levels also persist in legacy designs. The comparative analysis provided of these logic families is succinct.