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https://amzn.to/2BR0Xnr (Link to the book on Amazon) I have been a fan of Michael Barr since I read about his work with the Toyota Unintended Acceleration case where his team was able to identify and reproduce some very exotic conditions where automotive software failed. (Every Embedded Engineer should at least read about that case, the link is a good summary) I recently noticed a book co-authored by Barr called “Programming Embedded Systems” and I was excited to get my hands on it as I expected to learn a couple of profound tricks from a master (the book itself is pretty old, 2nd edition published in 2006). Unfortunately the book did not live up to my expectations. Since I am often asked which book I would recommend to start with, I was interested in taking this one for a test drive. Looking over the table of contents I thought that this may be a good beginner’s book, introducing embedded systems. Fair enough. Table of Contents: Introduction Getting to Know the Hardware Your First Embedded Program Compiling Linking and Locating Downloading and Debugging Memory Peripherals Interrupts Putting it All Together Operating Systems eCOS Examples Embedded Linux Examples Extending Functionality Optimization Techniques The first thing I found odd was the choice of development platform. The book is very tightly coupled to the Arcom VIPER-Lite development kit which features a 200MHz PXA255 Xscale processor (based on the ARM v.5TE architecture). This is a PC/104 form factor board and boasts 64MB of SDRAM and 16MB of “ROM” of which 1MB is dubbed as “BOOT ROM”. In fact it has almost every property which the book uses in Chapter 1 to describe what would NOT be an embedded system! I quote "The design of an embedded system to perform a dedicated function is in direct contrast to that of the personal computer. It too is comprised of computer hardware and software and mechanical components (disk drives, for example). However, a personal computer is not designed to perform a specific function. Rather, it is able to do many different things. Many people use the term general-purpose computer to make this distinction clear.". Looking at the VIPER PC104 computer it seems to me very much general purpose and I would by that definition classify the platform chosen here as a "general-purpose computer" instead. Besides, in my world of 8-bit microcontrollers where 16KB of FLASH and 1KB of RAM is large I do not easily consider a machine with 64MB of SDRAM as an embedded system. I do hate to make the distinction between the two myself though (would you consider e.g. your cellular phone an embedded system? It has more power than the original IBM PC or the Apple II after all!). But to be fair the concepts do transfer and the board at least does not have a Keyboard, mouse and VGA port, so I will go along with that if you could get your hands on one! I wanted to get at least the specs for the board only to find that the board is no longer available from Eurotech (it took me some time to realize that in 2007 (11 years ago - 1 year after publication of the 2nd edition of this book) Arcom was re-named to Eurotech). In fact it looks like this board has become entirely obsolete and unobtainable which is a pity as the book’s examples are so tightly coupled to this board that you would not be able to “follow along” if you did not have it at hand. If only they had just used a simple 8051, AVR or PIC or even an Arduino board instead of this very specialized and unique board nobody has ever heard of! Over all the book seems to try and do way too much in too little depth, so we are covering the very basics like introducing what is an embedded system and what is a peripheral through to Embedded Linux and Real Time Systems in one book of 260 odd pages. The result is that the book barely scratches the surface on each topic and has almost no meat behind any of these topics. O’Reilly has entire books dedicated to topics which are dismissed in one paragraph in this one. I was e.g. amused in Chapter 2 when there was a section on “Schematic Fundamentals” showing the symbols used for a resistor, capacitor and a diode and an introduction to what a timing diagram looks like. Chapter 7 explains how bitwise AND, OR and XOR can be used to manipulate bits, etc. but in Chapter 9 the examples start using function pointers without skipping a beat or explaining what a pointer is or how they can point at functions, just assuming the same reader who needed to be explained how to mask bits will be adept at using pointers ... There were also a number of subjective “facts” in the book which I do not quite agree with, e.g. this table: I seriously question the numbers in this table, e.g. I would say from experience that the number of units sold goes up as systems become smaller and simpler. I think I would go out of business rather quickly if I did $100K developments for products selling at $10 a piece and never sold more than 100 pieces of these. I would also say that my car’s ABS controller (likely on the lower end of that resource scale) must be fail-proof, while my Cellular Phone (on the High scale) requires me restarting it regularly, and I would say my ABS computer would have a life of 10’s of years while my phone is hardly going to live for more than 2. So let’s just agree that plenty of embedded systems below 64KB are safety critical and sells millions of units and use nanowatts of electricity so I disagree with the last 4 rows there. It seems like this book is trying to cater for fairly experienced programmers as well as complete novices. My opinion is that any book should always pick a specific audience and speak to that audience well. If you try to speak to everyone you will please nobody. If the reader is someone so green that they cannot mask in bits and do not know how to compile and link their program the same book is not appropriate for showing people real-time OS concepts, schedulers and function pointers. I think the book leaps forward too far too often in a way that newcomers will feel that half of the book was so basic that they already know this, and the other half is so advanced that it would be out of their reach to grasp. And for experts the advanced parts of the book are so shallow that they would get very little value out of it, and of course the other half would be a waste of time. So in summary I think the book covers a lot of ground by scratching the surface on just too many concepts without getting deep enough into any of them to really teach anybody anything new about Embedded Programming. I always make sure to read a couple of the good and bad reviews on Amazon and the reviews there were very much in line with my experience. Like one of the reviewers this was the first time I bought an O’Reilly book where I really felt that it was not worth the money. One reviewer I think summed it up the best “... To experienced programmer, this is never the book for you. To beginner, maybe this is easier to understand, but i really dont think this will help you in EMBEDDED C programming...” you can read his full review as well as the others here https://www.amazon.com/review/R10VHMT76YWZVV/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1565923545

So while I am in a book reviewing mood. This book by Steve McConnell (of Code Complete Fame) I now keep on my desk. It is a reference on all the important topics in software project management. The book is expertly laid out so you can read it in the order which you need for your situation. If you are on a project and you need help there are instructions in the introduction on which order to read, if you are a top-down kind of person there is an order and if you are a bottom up kind of person yet another order. I was giving a class on the topic and made a list of all the important topics to cover, when I got this book I found that it covered them all and then some. This is hands down the best project management book I have read. I really liked the discussion on the difference between a Target Date and a Deadline and also the Cone of Uncertainty in general. Whether you are using Agile methods or more traditional sequential methods to run your projects, this book will help you either way. Perhaps my favorite part of the book is an excercise on estimation where he asks readers to estimate things like the temperature of the surface of the sun, you can make a range as wide as you need to - but you have to make the range wide enough to have 90% confidence that the correct answer is within your range - most people fail miserably at doing this! Check it out here : https://amzn.to/2SszcbR

https://amzn.to/2Vibb9c After posting the negative review on the other book here I realized that it is not much help unless you provide an alternative! A couple of years ago I stumbled upon this book by Elicia White. Ever since I have recommended it as a must read to every new member of my team, even if they had years of experience they always reported back that they learned something valuable from reading it. I stumbled upon this book looking for something on Design Patterns in Embedded Systems, and in terms of that this was not what I was looking for, there is barely a mention of design patterns in the book, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I did find. I like where the book starts of, explaining the value of Design and Architecture and why this is where you should start with your project. She moves on to basic I/O and Timers which I think goes together pretty well, but importantly she covers the important use cases and patterns quite nicely and points out all of the most common pitfalls people fall into. The next chapter, “Making the Flow of Activity” covers the main paradigms for Embedded Systems like superloop and event driven approaches and even covers table driven state machines and even interrupts, I particularly liked the section called “How NOT to use interrupts”. Next chapter “Doing more with less” was a pretty good introduction to the methods you have to learn to tell how much RAM and FLASH you are using, and she covers important concepts like not using malloc. The chapter on Math is sure to teach even experienced engineers a couple of new tricks and the last chapter on power consumption is practical and well done. Overall I felt like this was a great book for beginners and a pretty good recap even for experienced engineers who will no doubt also learn a couple of new tricks after going through this book.