bookreview Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White

[Orunmila]

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.