Linux Device Drivers (Paperback)

After reading all the reviews and all the ravings about this book, I made the mistake of spending my money on it! Alas! What a waste. Its like one gigantic piece of mish-mash-mess. All the information might be in there (who knows). But, finding out the correct info is almost impossible! The scull driver is a joke.

Another irritating thing about the book is that it attempts to throw all sorts of info at you, all at the same time! Guys, take a break. Present information, one at a time, and only when needed.

Essentially, I was trying to write a driver to read information off my Nikon F100 onto my TP600 running Mandrake 8.0. And life was miserable till I finally started digging through some other driver code that you get with the kernel sources. Gosh, that made life so simple.

But, when I first read this book, I was almost ready to give up writing Linux drivers. I didn't know where to start and where I would end up! I was lost, confused, and felt utterly hopeless.

Also, I wondered if the other guys who had raved about this book were:
1. the authors and their friends?
2. guys who had no clue what they were talking/writing about?
3. guys who were happy to see that there was a book on Linux drivers, but neither bought nor read it!

So, don't trust these reviews. This is one heck of a horrible book that you should most definitely stay away from. Cause if you read, you would never be able to write any useful drivers.

Read the source.

The book covers:
* An introduction to device drivers and building and running modules. The second chapter is especially useful since it serves to document the building process for the kernel space.
* Debugging techniques and concurrency/race conditions. These two chapters briefly document general concepts before detailing Linux constructs.
* A basic char driver (scull - Simple Character Utility for Loading Localities) is considered in chapter 3 and referred through later throughout the text.
* Memory allocation, hardware I/O, and interrupt handlers are discussed next.
* Various types of drivers (PCI, USB, block, network, and TTY) drivers are taken up in the last half of the book. These chapters should be especially useful for anybody writing drivers for these types of devices.

The index is fairly exhaustive so looking up terms should not be a problem. Overall, I recommend this book to anybody writing device drivers for the Linux platform. It contains a wealth of Linux knowledge in one convenient book.

The book suffers from two main problems:

1. Presentation is disorganized. The book reads as if the authors sat down and planned out what chapters to cover. That part is good. It does NOT seem like they planned further than that. The text within each chapter seems haphazard. Disorganized. Thrown together. The authors have no concept of when to start a new paragraph, so topics are strung together piecemeal. The whole book is confusing, making the reading of this book very frustrating.

2. The material is presented at a frenetic pace. As I was reading the book, it felt like there was a conveyor belt feeding me information, getting faster and faster without a break. The authors feel like they can throw everything but the kitchen sink at you in a very short time. Information, minute details, big ideas, analogies, and code get thrown at you fast and furious. It starts at chapter one and just gets worse from there, making the reading of this book downright difficult.

Difficult and confusing. A good characterization of the book.

In summary, this book is NOT a tutorial. It is NOT a guide. Don't make the mistake of buying this book expecting a gentle (or even a not-so-gentle) introduction to writing device drivers.

IMHO, the market is still open for a good book on the subject of writing device drivers for Linux.