Customer Reviews

Front Panel: Designing Software for Embedded User Interfaces

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is so thin on content as to make it unusable for real development work. The actual number of pages devoted to user-interface software design is TINY. With luck, it might fill out an acceptable overview article in a magazine.

All the rest is fluff. For example, I was appalled by the amount of space the author devoted to a beginner's introduction to C++ concepts and syntax. (That chapter is longer than the one on the use finate state machines in UI implementation...)

Finally, the author's approach to the whole process of UI software design is very ad hoc; it's not a methodology at all, and what he does is certainly not "engineering".

A much better choice is Ian Horrocks' "Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts". It shows a reusable, scalable SOFTWARE ENGINEERING approach to UI software development -- something that Niall Desmond Murphy doesn't seem to understand...

This book covers embedded system design without forgetting the original reason for it -- the user. A truly balanced approach to the problems in this domain. Many years worth of hard-won wisdom about embedded system design AND the users of embedded systems. You can learn it from him, or the hard, expensive way. Fun reading for an "old hand", besides.

As a software "old hand" in embedded systems for way too many years, I ought to know better than to be taken in by the hype on this book. But, I blew it. This was a waste of money. The examples are misleading, the text is just plain wrong in far too many places, and the direction he takes in instructing is insulting. Then to cap it off, the compiler he wrote the examples for is very old. I have used Borland compilers since Turbo-Pascal days, and I used BC3.1 for years (still have it on one of my systems), but I would not recommend them today as they have been passed by. He obviously has had experience in embedded user interfaces, but this book will not help novices learn the how, where, or why of the subject in a way that they can use for the future. My recommendation is to pass on this one...