Rating: 

My technique when reading this book was to first read through the book cover to cover before hacking away at the examples. I am currently working through the examples which can be downloaded from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/embsys2/ and on that page there is a link to "examples". However, there is a lot of content in the examples files that simply isn't included within the pages of the book. Download and print off the source would be my advice.

As one of the other reviewers mentioned, the book does tend to gloss over some important aspects which I would have liked to have seen more of. More work on ISR's would have been brilliant and a load more on developing drivers under linux. I would have liked to have seen more advanced techniques to get the most out of my board - like recompiling the kernel and a greater discussion on redboot. A walkthrough of the contents of a mapfile would have saved me searching elsewhere and some lines in the example source code and makefiles are unreferenced at all in the book. You will need to have at least minimal exposure to standard gcc toolchains although the book does cover the fundamentals. Finally, I would have also liked to have seen more reference made to keeping deadlines when making programs executing under linux on the target. Whilst the version of linux on the arcom board uses pthreads and has therefore no direct knowledge of deadlines...I would have liked to have seen references made to techniques I can use in my programs to help prevent deadlines from failing. The book however does discuss this in more detail when discussing eCos however, as the board supplied by Arcom came with linux - this is practically irrelevant to me.

So now, the book uses two methods for building applications for the Arcom board (well, three if you include the eCos toolchain...but my board came with linux so i'll stick to that). You can either build your programs to be loaded directly at position x in RAM and then executed by the target directly (through redboot)...or, you can build your programs to be executed under linux. The examples packages at the link above contain only the toolchain to build programs for direct execution i.e. without linux control and these are easily installed on your development host. The linux cross compile toolchain to build applications for execution under linux on the target is included on the CD which comes with the development pack of the Arcom board. I haven't quite reached installing that toolchain on my host system yet but i'm definately looking forward to building my programs with it. Embedded linux - here I come...

I suppose what I was looking for when I bought this book was a manual for the Arcom board...and what I actually got was a detailed insight into programming embedded systems using the Arcom board as a hands on example. I'm happy with what I got...actually...I'm more than happy...if only you could see me right now :). Thank you Barr and Massa for a great book!