Customer Reviews

Embedded Linux Development Using Eclipse

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

 

 

Summary:
I have mixed feeling about rating this a 4 or 5 star book. That's not, necessarily, due to the content. But rather due to my feelings on how the title of the book and how it relates to the content and the price of the book. By way of disclosure, I read the book coming from the subject material with view of "bare metal" ARM CORTEX M0/M3 development in mind, not Linux. So, this obviously impacts how I review the book. In the end, I felt that the book was good enough to warrant 5 stars because of the value I received from reading the material on the Eclipse and, more so, on the CDT and other Eclipse plug-ins.

Details:
Mr. Abbott does a good job taking the reader through the key highlights of the of the Eclipse. There are very few books, as he states, that address both Eclipse and CDT and how the two related specifically to embedded development. I agree. This is a nice book to have for the developer new to or somewhat familiar but still puzzled with Eclipse. It is really the only "Beginner's Guide" available and fills that niche of What Eclipse is, how to begin using it, and to begin applying Eclipse to embedded development. The first couple of chapters briefly review the history of Eclipse, how to download and install eclipse (including a short mention of Eclipse on Windows using both Cygnus and MinGW), and a tour of the eclipse environment. Following chapters target the C/C++ Development Tool (CDT) with examples of how to used the CDT to edit/build and, to a lessor extent run and debug programs on target hardware. Finally, the author addresses additional Eclipse plug-ins such as the DSDP (the Device Software Development Platform), the Plug-in development Environment (PDE) and Rich Client Platform (RCP). So, in an approximately 240 pages of material, covering Eclipse/CDT/PDE/RCP/DSDP, you shouldn't by the book expecting to become an accomplished Linux developer after reading the book. Rather, you will have an introduction to one set of tools and an idea of how to begin developing with the tools, with a caveat; a compiler is not discussed in any depth.

It is at this point that I usually include the table of contents for the book, but since the book has the Amazon "Look Inside" logi, this isn't necessary.

Finally, it turns out that if you go to the web site the author is associated with [...], this book is one of a few the author has written with the full title in mind; Linux, Eclipse, and embedded development. Intellimetrix offers courses in the subject material and the books are supporting material. I felt that Newnes priced the book a bit high given the lack of in depth content. That said, I'd purchase the book again knowing what I do now.

The first half of the book is about general introduction. After a quick background briefing of Eclipse, author gives detailed step to step installation guide. A walk through menu introduces functionalities for basic operations with ample screenshots illustrating the steps which are easy to follow. In addition, a demo project is used to show some more features of project and debug environment. The second half of the book targets embedded developers with introduction of device software development platform and some advanced features such as Plug-In, UML, and CVS, which covers interests beyond embedded c code development. In the end, this book has a quick browse of some Eclipse based products from several vendors. Overall, if you are a non-java developer looking for an introductory book on Eclipse, this is a good choice for you. If you expect more, you probably have to search online starting with eclipse.org.

This book is one of the most useful books I have ever purchased. It takes you through all necessary steps to install and operate the Eclipse IDE for those using the 'C' programming language on embedded controllers. Highly recommended!

Eclipse has grown significantly over the past years. It is actually a fairly decent code editor now. However, if you just follow the contents of this book, it will not grow beyond that - just an editor. And there are far better C/C++ editors than Eclipse.
In my experience, most people who develop for embedded Linux do not use Eclipse at all, unless they need to use specific plug-ins (as provided by the commercial Linux vendors - discussed at the end of the book).

I think that if you are just an application developer, you won't start using Eclipse after reading this book - you'll stick to what you are used to.
If you are a kernel developer, you have no reason to switch to Eclipse.

If you are a systems designer that needs to keep a group of application developers within your company happy by providing them with an IDE - this book might be for you. How many of you are there?