Product Description
This book was the first to bring essential knowledge on embedded systems technology and techniques under a single cover. This second edition has been updated to the state-of-the-art by reworking and expanding performance analysis with more examples and exercises, and coverage of electronic systems now focuses on the latest applications. Researchers, students, and savvy professionals schooled in hardware or software design, will value Wayne Wolf’s integrated engine… More >>
#1 by W Boudville on April 18, 2010 - 7:20 pm
The average person in the US now uses a computer. Typically running a Microsoft operating system or unix or linux. Yet there is an entire ecosystem of embedded computers out there, invisible to most people. Wolf’s text explains how you can program such computers as well as design the circuitry in which they might exist. Here, “computer” in the book essentially means microprocessor plus some off-chip memory. The book surveys two main microprocessor families – ARM and SHARC. These are not the most common microprocessors. (Which might be by Motorola.). But Wolf chooses them to illustrate different design ideals for their instruction sets.
One nice thing about the book is that you get a direct grasp of the hierarchy of design and logic. Climbing from the low level devices of latches, gates, flip-flops and the like, to the microprocessor and its machine language, to the corresponding and far easier to use assembly language. Then, upwards to an operating system.
Rating: 4 / 5
#2 by Software Engineer on April 18, 2010 - 7:59 pm
This book was the required text for a class or I would not have purchased it. It is poorly organized and poorly written. The author provides an annoying amount of superfluous commentary and makes unnecessary digressions, both of which obscure the points he must be trying to make, and the content is sometimes repetitious. Finally, the book contains grammatical errors and the text includes what must surely be editorial content such as “stet” and “the acronym is the name”, rendering some sentences unintelligible. Most books have their faults, but this one has too many to make it a worthwhile purchase; there are better texts which cover the same material.
Rating: 1 / 5
#3 by wiredweird on April 18, 2010 - 10:13 pm
Do you know what percentage of all computers run Windows or some kind of Unix? Guess. I’ll give you the answer later.
This book is about all the other computers out there – the ones in your car’s airbags and antilock brakes; in your watch, cellphone, TV and its remote, CD player, and computer keyboard; in your implanted defibrillator.
Wolf starts with an introduction in terms of a personal-scale, practical example. Next he goes into what a CPU is in lots more detail than most programmers ever think about – the kind of detail you need when the CPU interacts so intimately with the other components in the system. Maybe you never heard of the ARM or SHARC processors (unless you already do embedded work), but they’re good representative choices. ARM is an incredibly common core architecture, with supervisor mode and memory mapping, what it takes to run a “real” OS, whether it does or not. SHARC is a signal processor – a real processor, but with extras for fast artihmetic processing. Together, the two stand adequately for a large fraction of the embedded processors in use.The next chapter goes over hardware basics: the bus, memory mapped IO, interface issues, and in-circuit debugging.
The rest of the book generally covers higher level issues: software design, embedded and real-time OSs, coprocessors, and networks. Although coverage of IIC and similar board-level communication is good, I found the ethernet discussion weak. Anyone working at this level is likely to need 802.2 protocols, which I did not see mentioned. The book’s strengths far outnumber its occasional soft spots, though.
Embedded computing is a huge, many faceted field, so no book can cover more than a tiny fraction of what it means. Still, this addresses a broad, useful range what you need to program 99% of the computers out there – because only about 1% run Windows or Unix.
//wiredweird
Rating: 4 / 5