Customer Reviews

So You Wanna Be an Embedded Engineer: The Guide to Embedded Engineering, From Consultancy to the Corporate Ladder (Embedded Technology)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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It may be a four-star book for those readers who migrate to embedded engineering without traditional EE training. The book has a lot of good advice for such people.
On the downside, the tecnical portion of the book seems to be too strongly relied on the author's personal experience, some of which is probably dated and irrelevant. For example, PIC microcontrollers are out of favor based on "weird architecture" of a mostly obsolete PIC, which the author had to probram in assembler. Some of other microcontrollers and development tools discussed in the book are neither available or not recommended for new designs.
As a reader, I would mostly focus on one-time reading of the nontechnical parts of the book relevant to one's experience and goals. For practical embedded projects, I would not rely on this book.

This book is great for current and future embedded contractors. This book is not for those that want to become embedded consultants (those who are paid strictly for their advice and not there time). The author offers great advice on everything from the landscape of 8 to 32-bit micro-controllers, to obtaining the required credentials (read BS degree), to the set of skills that are required. Although, the author could couple links to important documents, where to find them, how/why to use them, with his overview. I also really enjoyed the analysis of the trade offs between working for different sized companies and being a contractor.

I would have liked to see a more in-depth analysis of the commands/reasoning the author sends to the software tools. This would better help those unfamiliar with cross-compilation or software development as a whole (hardware types). Although, the author does reference his other book for a deeper discussion of the topic, but it would represent the title better if this books was more complete in this area.

On the hardware side, I would prefer a more complete coverage about the key structures to a generic micro-controller, the role they play, and how to communicate with them. I would also like this to include information about system bring-up.

As a side note, the author gives the best reason that I have heard of why one would want to use non-DRM tools.

A friendly easy to read book which covers all aspects of entering the field of embedded engineering from an author with real experience treading the path himself.

The technical information is detailed and well presented but I would recommend that those readers who are particularly interested in the detail should also read the author's first book - Embedded System Design on a Shoestring: Achieving High Performance with a Limited Budget - which goes into a lot more detail.

There is also a lot of invaluable information for anyone looking to move into self-employment as a consultant and a lot of good detail about the tax implications of doing so.

In summary, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Embedded Engineering and who is looking to make a career from it. Final year electronics/computing students should especially read this as it will really help focus their job hunting on graduation.