Customer Reviews

IrDA Principles and Protocols: The IrDA Library, Vol. 1

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If you expect to have the knowlege you need to program an IrDA stack for your device after reading this book, you are sadly out of luck. Having had many years of difficult experiences with IrDA I was eagerly anticipating this book, but was seriously disappointed. IrDA is a great, inexpensive, relatively secure protocol that should be in many more devices than it is - but sadly this book will do little to change that.

This, the first book on this subject, is more of a lightweight overview than the down and dirty technical treatise that is needed to assist developers who are trying to implement an IrDA stack. IrDA implementation has always been problematic because of the poorly written specifications and idiosyncratic implementations, and while a good book has been needed for a long time, this isn't the book. It just doesn't cover the subject in sufficient detail.

Some background - one should be amazed that for a technology that has been around for almost ten years this is the first book written about it - that is until you realize the people who make money off it have an interest in keeping the technology somewhat inaccessible. Sadly, this approach has hurt the acceptance of IrDA. If you look around you will see that other popular communication/connectivity protocols have an abundance of books written about them - Serial, Parallel, USB, Ethernet, just to name a few; and within these books you have the tools to complete an implementation, including CD's with sample code. You won't find that here; it just doesn't exist for IrDA.

So unfortunately for developers new to IrDA the secrets of implementing IrDA protocols are still safe with the software foundries that comprise the IrDA association. At under 200 pages this book is a true lightweight for this genre. This book needs to bulk up to about twice the page count for it to contain the necessary information to make it truly useful to a working engineer.

Why was I not surprised that the back page of the book advertises the training and consulting services of the author?

I bought this as a S/W engineer implementing an IrDA stack

Not much content is allocated to the inner workings of a IrDA stack.
Excessive content is spent on the IrDA physical layer which, to a large extent, is dictated by commercial IrDA compliant LEDs.

What is missing are message sequence charts and explanations for the typical establishment of a IrLMP/IrTTY connection.

Also, what would be useful is a real stack dump with notes of which fields are changed as the connection is established.

Fine to begin with but after analysing a real stack dump you are quickly taken past what is offered.

"IrDA Principles and Protocols" by Charles Knutson is the ultimate guide to A) Understanding the background of IRDA B)The architecture of IrDA C)The methodology necssary in building an IrDA stack D) Helps determine if the effort and resources involved, would result in a better ROI by internally developing IrDA, or licensing an IrDA stack.

This easily read text, should be a starting point for anyone who is investigating implementing short range wireless IrDA into a product. The comprehensive nature of the material is well structured and not just an academic exercise. It is written for developers who are investigating real design parameters and decisions. This quick read gives practical guidance and a solid foundation to making development decisions.

This book is an excellent introduction to what IrDA is, and how it works. Instead of wading through the specification documents, learn about the powerful capability of IrDA and how it is structured.
This book is an excellent refresh for anyone who has been around IrDA and would like to stay current or brush up on the topic. I have been around IrDA specifications and use models from the beginning, and found this book to be a great resource for explaining the topic to others. Plus, I learned a few things that perhaps I thought I already knew.
Straightforward and easy to read, this book is very accessible to a wide variety of readers.
Any engineer or manager with an IrDA port in their product should have a copy of this book on their bookshelf.

Now I am waiting to add Volume 2 to my Library.

It seems that every year a new short range wireless technology is invented that will mark an end to the "lowly" IrDA transceiver that allows people to "beam" business cards, games, and calendar events between PDAs. Today's gadgets come equipped with Wi-Fi, 3G, and Bluetooth for "high speed" data transfer, and yet IrDA is still standard on all laptops and PDAs, because it continues to do what it does better than any other wireless technology on the market.

In "IrDA Principles and Protocols" Charles Knutson explores the history and goals of IrDA, followed by a clear and concise overview of the IrDA protocol layers. Knutson explains why IrDA is so good at what it does without getting bogged down in the gory details. This book is a must-read for anyone who thinks that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will "kill" IrDA.