Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

excellent overview of embedded development!perfect for newbies looking to understand what it's all about - and existing embedded devs looking for a reference / refresher...In addition to covering system architecture - it also covers real-world stuff like:-Why some math operations are slow on microcontrollers (and how you can work around that)-How to make a power budget-How to read a spec sheet-How to debug things-How interrupts workThis book gets pretty technical - but manages to do so without being brutal / off-putting.It's a fake-it-till-you-make-it world... If you can figure out how to load sample code on an Arduino - studying this book might be enough to convince yourself (and maybe a startup) - that you can do embedded development professionally.If there's anything this book doesn't cover in-depth it might be stuff related to "realtime" (RTOS) / concurrency.Highly recommended!

This is the best introductory book on embedded systems programming I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of them !Dec 2018 update : I want to elaborate on that a bit since I have been looking for good books on the topic for many years and this is still the best one I have found.I really liked the specific audience this book is aimed at. It does not try to explain the C programming language or how an "if statement" works or any basics like that, there are plenty of books and online tutorials on how to do that after all. What it does do is cover extremely well the parts of C programming which is DIFFERENT when you work on an embedded system, so the standard C tutorials you will find on the web will explain the semantics for you but will not warn you about how this tends to go wrong specifically in embedded systems.The book is quite thorough so it can also teach even very experienced embedded engineers a thing or two which may be missing from their education - I liked the section on Taylor Series as an example of this.The main areas of focus I felt were also well chosen, start with Architecture and Design first, Basic I/O and Timers, Program Structure, Peripherals, Boot Loaders, Optimization, a very important chapter on Math and then Power Saving.I think that is a great list of topics where approaching them on an embedded system is really very different from doing this on a Laptop or PC running an operating system.

This book will cover almost everything in embedded systems, but it is way too broad. As i was reading it, coming from someone who has knowledge in embedded, it only led to more and more confusion.It is not fun to read and it is extremely dry. Science books can be exciting, this one isn't. At all.What did I learn? I learned that one should always be brave enough and test the hardware himself by oscilloscopes even if you're a software engineer. That's all...This book is for software engineers who wish they were computer engineers lol. In other words, if you want to write code for the hardware, this will give you some broad information.Warning: if you're not familiar with embedder at all, this book will be boring and confusing.

Covers a lot of important topics that every embedded engineer should know. This is a great book in that it gives you background knowledge of things you need to know or go out and learn without getting bogged down with too many details. The idea of describing design patterns is a good one, though some of them seem a little too abstract and like they're trying too hard (like factory patterns) to formalize ideas into some universal pattern or structure.The fact there is a math section and a low power section near the end is really cool and very useful.My main issue with this book is that there are several errata (many are listed on the publisher website) that are known about but they have not bothered doing a reprint. Another issue is that some things are not explained enough so you cant tell if it is an error or intentional. For example in the bootloaders section there is a function pointer that gets cast and set to a static address. However, as well as the casting there is a dereference of the address before assigning to the function pointer which is not explained.Overall though, I highly recommend this book, plus the author comes across as a nice and cool person.

Despite "making" in the title, this book is 95% about writing embedded software. That's not bad, but readers expecting hardware design techniques will find only one chapter with general testing advice that is most appropriate for someone from a software background. Even the chapters on I/O and peripherals are fully software-oriented. The book does assume some familiarity with programming in C-based languages, but it does a good job of fully explaining its code examples as well as the gang-of-four design patterns that some other books jump past quickly.My major criticism is that some topics are covered in extreme detail while others are mentioned only briefly with a (literal) recommendation to look up the rest on Wikipedia. A text can't cover every topic in depth, of course, but I found myself disagreeing with many of the choices on what to cover and what to gloss over. For example, I would have liked to see more on SPI, and I2C protocols as well as DMA techniques, but then the coverage of writing a bootloader is several levels above the rest of this book.With all that in mind, I found the most helpful parts of this book to be the wisdom and design technique (like why & how to avoid division operations on embedded systems) from an experienced developer. The interview questions at the end of each chapter were interesting and informative, even if I didn't always agree with the some of perspective. I'll keep this book on my reference shelf, mostly for some of the great techniques in the later chapters.

Very well written (though i havn't finished it just yet) it is a little difficult to put down, covers subjects i never even considered (obvious ones and not) regarding the process of making embedded systems.Well worth the buy.Great Author! @Elecia White

Excellent gap-filler. I bought this after listening to Elecia's podcast for a while and it's safe to say that her softly spoken tone comes through in the book. Very easy and enjoyable to read. Covers most aspects of embedded systems but should treated as more of an introduction. Used this during my embedded systems course at uni which assumed that students were already very familiar with most of these concepts. If you're doing an embedded class and feel like there's some gaps in your knowledge or you're spending a lot of the time just umming and ahhing then this is absolutely the book to buy!It's important to note however that this book is pretty light on code etc. It covers concepts and uses fairly liberal examples rather than the exact numbers and code that you will tend to see in other embedded books.

Book is good. Buy it from somewhere else. Don't waste your time on Amazon due to serious packing quality issues.

This book could be considered as set of advices and guidelines for embedded programming. Not exactly connected with any particular programming language or hardware platform, but trying to give reader general overview of working in embedded environment. Recommended for beginners in this topic, also for developers with some experience on "bigger" systems who try to enter embedded world. Some tricks can be also be interesting even for experienced engineers.

This is an excellent introduction to the concepts required for embedded design. It won't make you an expert in every aspect, but it will ensure you're not embarrassed by not knowing somehting obvious!