26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Complete but overly complicated, needs editing, March 28, 2005
This is a good book on SystemC, but it is not a good book for beginners. The book is overly complicated and provides levels of detail in its examples that are unnecessary to make the point or teach the subject.
For example, when discussing ports the book says the following:
DEFINITION: A SystemC interface is an abstract class that inherits from sc_interface and provides only pure virtual declarations of methods referenced by SystemC channels and ports. No implements or data are provided in a SystemC interface.
DEFINITION: A SystemC channel is a class that implements one or more SystemC interface classes and inherits from either sc_channel or sc_prim_channel. A channel implements all the methods of the inherited interface classes.
DEFINITION: A SystemC port is a class templated with and inheriting from a SystemC interface. Ports allow access of channels across module boundaries.
Huh?
This line of teaching led me into the bowels of SystemC and was unnecessary as a start. One can just say, "A port allows communication between blocks. Let's look at sc_in and sc_out to start".
I needed to get another book to recover from this instruction.
The examples in the book are generally OK and there is a website that has executable versions. Unfortunately, there needed to be more careful editing in the examples. The HelloWorld example has an obvious syntax error (an undeclared module is instantiated) and would never have run if it had been compiled.
I could not find the video mixer example that they used to teach ports on the web, and thus couldn't make progress.
Overall, this is a good book if you know SystemC and are interested in the details of how it is implemented. I would use it to learn the language, and it cannot act as a language reference guide.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
SystemC from a software perspective, January 17, 2007
I have been working as an firmware engineer for many years. As a new advernture, I am involved in investigating various algorithm modeling technique which can provide a good performance for firmware development. Obvioously, SystemC is a good candidate because of its ability to do transaction level based modelling. The question is how to pick up the language. First I tried the technical reference manual and white papers provided by the official system C website. It is quite an eye-openning experience but I think I need more. So I went to Amazon to see what was avaliable. I came across this book and the "System C Primer" book. I bought both.
The major difference between these two books is in the author's perspective. The author in this book approaches from a software background. He visualizes the whole systemC environment as a multi-threaded kernel. To learn the language is to become familiar with the different "API's" and "system calls". It is great for engineers who come from a fw/sw background. However, for engineers coming from the hw background, this book does not spend much time covering the topic on how to write SystemC model that is close to the hardware implementation (RTL or gates). They will be disappointed if this is their goal. I would recommend them to try the other book.
After saying that, I believe the safest bet probably is to get both books so you can have a full spectrum of knowledge of what the language can do for you. Then you will not get stuck knowing only one aspect of the language and you can decide which "hat" to wear according to your need.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the best beginning SystemC book out there, October 10, 2005
Before this book had come out, there were only a couple SystemC books available, and after reading them both, I still had no real grasp of how to write a basic program in SystemC. This book basically connected all the dots for me, and I was able to start writing a testbench in SystemC. For the best beginner's regimen, read this book cover-to-cover a couple times and get the "SystemC Golden Reference Guide" by Doulos for use as a syntax reference when you are actually writing your code.
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