not for electrical engineers   May 27, 2005

Way above average   April 18, 2004

It covers many topics which are relatively common knowledge among experienced hardware designers but you rarely find in one book. Some of those topics I've never seen in ANY book. There's some good stuff here. That said, it's probably not the ideal book for someone who's already tackled a few successful embedded hardware designs.


Good for the absolute beginner   February 27, 2004
  8 out of 10 found this review helpful

This book has some good information for the absolute beginner. Most of the information in this book should already be familiar to a person with some experience with Microcontroller development. Data sheets can be found on the Internet for most of the components described in this book. For everything related to the AVR Microcontroller, visit http://www.avrfreaks.net/. They have a GNU C compiler and some cool tools and links.


Well worth the read   January 27, 2004
  8 out of 9 found this review helpful

While I don't know if I could build my own embedded device after reading just this book (I don't think I'd be able to this after pretty much any one book), I still felt like this book still delivered on that promise more so than any other single hardware book I've read. So many books gloss over details, either because knowledge is assumed (which is fine in many cases), or because the author doesn't have the detailed knowledge to begin with. And even when the data is in the book, far too often it's exactly that: book data, repackaged information from other sources (often books themselves). It's much better when the knowledge ultimately comes from the author's experiences. Most of the knowledge in this book really seems to be of the latter, and better, variety. I also thought the detailed introductions to a wide range of topics were 'just right' - not too high-level, so they glossed over important details or the underlying fundamentals of how the particular thing worked, but also not so low-level that they assumed knowledge I would have had to go find elsewhere. This goes for a lot of different protocols (RS-232, RS-422, SPI, I2C, USB, and so on) as well as technologies (what's a DSP exactly?).


Very well done ! Way more interesting than I imagined...   January 17, 2004
  3 out of 4 found this review helpful

I've only read half of it so far, but it's been exceptionally good to this point. I can't say enough about how informative the first chapter "Introduction to computer architecture" was. The author seems excessively leary of noise in the circuit design chapter and a bit picky about how you draw your schematics, but I suppose these things come from experience.(or maybe just being paranoid and anal-retentive!) I may have jumped the gun reviewing it so quickly, but I highly doubt it's going to go bad all the sudden. Great book! :)