Customer Reviews

Embedded System Design on a Shoestring

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

 

 

This is an excellent book. I bought it sight-unseen and have been very pleased. The book takes you step-by-step through bringup of an inexpensive ARM7 evaluation board, first using assembly and then using C language with the Newlib embedded C library. The freely available GNU tool chain is used, so you can get up and running without investing in big-ticket commercial development tools.

The book is based on the Atmel EB40 evaluation board. The pricing sweet spot no longer favors this board, so I bought the EB40A instead. I had to figure out differences in the memory map, PIO addresses for the LEDs, and USART clock enable, but this was straightforward after Google searches for the EB40A.

I highly recommend this book. The technical content is accurate, and it is well-written. It appears to be written by an embedded developer, for embedded developers. Other embedded books I have read recently seem organized around marketing objectives, and are over generalized. Those books are interesting but not very useful in the practical sense.

Edwards' book is useful in the practical sense. I hope he continues to write. I'm ready with my credit card when his next book is published.

This book was a speculative purchase, but it turns out to have been the best of the books I've bought in my search for ground up experience with ARM architecture embedded systems.. The level of the detail is just right, covering one of the most approachable ARM devices available and tackling the GNU compiler setup in just the depth I needed to get me going. My only issues are that the book could do with updating a little, this is going to be an unending task for the author due to the huge popularity of the ARM architecture and the huge number of vendors implementign variations of it.. I wanted an Intel/Marvell XScale PXA270 tutorial and this is as close as I think I'll get... a great buy.

This book is a very practical, and effective guide in using low-cost tools for embedded system development. Extensive tips, and walk-throughs are given. It is a highly recommended hand-on book.

My biggest problem with this book is between chapters two and three which has a huge gap. Another chapter should be inserted to ease into the technical jargon of chapter three such as "What is an embedded system?" Also a glossary of technical terms and acronyms would not be a bad idea. The author does a good job of explaining the business aspects of being an embedded engineer.