Customer Reviews

Embedded Software Development with eCos

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

 

 

This is an OK book, bringing together a lot of the eCos documentation and some sage experience.

However, the author did not spend very much time on the index, and this limits the usefullness of the book compared to the online documentation.

For example, all of the eCos functions start with "cyg_", yet none of them appear in the index.

Just got the book yesterday and have been reading through it ever since. This book will be an immense help for both first time eCos users as well as those of us who don't have it quite figured out yet. While much of the information presented in the book might be found by wandering about the eCos web site, reading documents, FAQs, and previous postings to the mailing lists, Anthony has presented it all in one place in a consise, logical order. It will be a great help.

Currently (as of ECOS 2.0) you need this book in order to get up to speed and programming ECOS. Unfortunately it isn't very well organized and it is very well written.

Like many "open source" books, there is a lot of zeal that isn't necessary to communicate the point :-) Lots of discussion about how the source directory is layed out, and then how not everything follows the layout (this is classic open source, here is the standard, but many people don't follow it.)

For me I read this book out of order, how to install first, then the examples, then started reading the chapters on internals. The book re-hashes reference documentation on the redhat site, but organizes it a bit better.

The book comes with a CD that has cygwin and basically the Gnu Pro kit on it for Windows users. That's great, but I'm a FreeBSD user. There is very little information about using ecos from a shell using ecosconfig & and gdb. That is the books worst failing, there should be a couple of chapters devoted to non-Windows users. (or maybe split the book into an ECOS reference and then a platform users guide).

Once you're finally up an running and have gotten your first target "application" to boot, the book is a handy printed reference and it does explain the internals better than the web pages do. All in all, I wanted "ECOS in a Nutshell" and got "Learn ECOS in 21 days"

I am happy to report that the printing problems have finally been resolved. I have reviewed the latest copies of the book and the text seems fine.

Sorry about this.

Thanks,

Anthony Massa

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I apologize for the lack of effort on the part of the publisher. Please know that I have nothing to do with the publishing process at this point. I have been begging Prentice Hall to fix these errors and have forwarded on the comments I have received from readers. It seems these comments are falling on deaf ears. Please contact Prentice Hall directly if you receive a book that contains printing errors.

I hope the content in the book is still valuable to all eCos developers.

Thanks,

Anthony

To follow up on the printing. The copy I got was very, very bad. Pretty much every page has multiple printing errors making the book very difficult to read and in some places you need to understand the content already to make headway.

The book used to ship with a CD. Now there's a sheet saying to go look at phptr.com for a download. I could not find the CD download, but I did find the book in pdf. At least the pdf can be read.

Bad job Prentice Hall!

Be aware. The current printing of this book has some serious typesetting problems. Nearly every page has "garbled" text where letters overlap. The publisher responded by stating: "The book which you are referring is now temporary unavailable due to major printing errors."

I recommend this book not only to those who are just beginning to use eCos but also ameatures in the world of RTOS. The audience is treated like a 'child' as Anthony goes on to explain step by step. The accompanying software is complete and gets perfectly installed as described.

There are good illustrations accompanying the text that help in understanding the text. It is written more like a story rather than a manual, so it is difficult to put it down once you start reading it.

This book gives a step by step method of getting an embedded system up and running using ecos OS. Explains very well in simple terminology "how to put various components together to create what you need". In short, a very good book on ecos in nutshell.

The book is a good introduction to eCos, even though much of the book's material can be found in the eCos documentation, available on line. The sample code and accompanying explanations give the reader a leg up on building useful software; unfortunately, all the code is in C, so C++ programmers may have to do a little more digging to get their code working correctly. Finally, while the walk-throughs of installation, configuration, and building are great, they all are based on Cygwin running under Windows. A corresponding section for Linux users would be a useful plus, especially since (from a perusal of the eCos mailing list), build errors under Linux are not uncommon.

All things considered, however, the book is a great buy.

Kudos to Anthony for documenting eCos in such thorough detail. The text is readable and immediately useful for anyone considering or using eCos for embedded work.

I think that the porting and RedBoot sections alone are worth the price of the book. The documentation on the configuration tool is also extremely useful, since it isn't so well documented anywhere else. And the fact that Anthony uses real embedded systems in the examples (instead of a PC) makes this text infinitely more credible.