47 of 53 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
If your company will buy it for you, get it, Mar 14 2005
By JLC "xqusame" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software (Hardcover)
In the ARM tradition of charging for everything, the firmware guide by Sloss is easy to read, and comprehensive up to ARM10/StrongARM XScale/926/940. That said, the book looks like the notes from a firmware lecture delivered by an Arm Apps engineer. The book is strongest in coverage of MMU and cache, but weak on ARM11 (1136 only and as a final chapter) and essentially non-existent in Jazelle coverage. Nice features are the toy RTOS which appears early at reappears with more features (memory protection, and MMU, for example). That this book is so quickly out of date brings the point that MDR bulleted last year, that the ARM family needs birth control but that is a topic for another discussion. Sloss' book has 'non-commercial license' for all the sourcecode. huh? Regarding this book, Freescale for example publishes equivalent information (old ESS manuals) in the 860/8260 training manuals for free, on their website. If your company pays for your books, by all means have them get the sloss book for you it makes a great read on the john, but if you are a student or independent developer, you would be as well served by studying the ARM ARM and applicable ARM source code for U-Boot, Redboot and the L4 microkernel, or even Ed Sutter's book, with the added benefit that you would have a license to use the code in your project.
36 of 42 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book for ARM's firmware programmers so far, Aug 6 2004
By lethalgambit - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software (Hardcover)
There are many books on ARM's architecture or manual references. So far, this book is the only book which concentrates on the firmware development side. Both assembly language and C are discussed, which is a relief for embedded/firmware engineers like me who like to combine both languages in a project.
The 15 chapters in the book are:
1- ARM Embedded Systems
2- ARM Processor Fundamentals
3- Introduction to the ARM instruction set
4- Introduction to the Thumb instruction set
5- Efficient C Programming
6- Writing and Optimizing ARM assembly code
7- Optimized Primitives
8- Digital Signal Processing
9- Exception and Interrupt Handling
10- Firmware
11- Embedded Operating Systems
12- Cache
13- Memory Protection Units
14- Memory Management Units
15- The Future of the Architecture
The strength of this book lies on the extensive examples on how to program ARM effectively. It is a nice guide for those who want to learn ARM programming style.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
extremely useful, April 14 2006
By E. Boks "Ewout" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software (Hardcover)
This book covers many aspects of programming the ARM familiy, including a surprisingly thorough discussion on fixed-point DSP computation.
Having come from another architecture, this book really got me going on ARM. It complements the documentation manufacturers usually provide for their ARM chips in that it covers the ARM core much more in-depth.
The book discusses everything from register usage to memory management units. If you want to become an expert programmer in C/Assembly on ARM systems, you must buy this book.
Also included is a nice comparison of the ARM and Gnu assembler directives, which came in handy when I converted an ARM assembly file to the Gnu syntax.