Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book in Embedded Software Design
Review: This book has done a great job in consolidating many key concepts and techniques in embedded software design. Though state machines and event-driven design are not new, the author proposed a truly reusable and integrated framework which is very well designed and particularly suitable for resource constrained embedded systems.Author's implementation of state machines is innovative and remarkable. It supports state nesting, automatic execution of entry/exit actions and default event handling by superstates. This allows you to implement UML statecharts in C++/C conveniently. In general this book is very clearly written and comprehensive. Its reference list is also valuable, pointing to some classics in OOD and good articles in Embedded Systems Programing. This book will definitely become a classic in embedded software itself. On the downside, I find the repeated analogy of the software model to quantum physics overwhelming. Besides the author chose to show you examples and implications before showing you the details and internal. This kind of abstraction may pose some question marks in your mind when you read the first few chapters. But do read on and you will appreciate the great ideas.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book and code
Review: This book was a definite eye-opener for me with regard to state machines. I recently rewrote a major piece of code to utilize the Quantum Framework (included with the book) and it has worked wonders. My previous code used a more traditional state machine and had quickly evolved into spaghetti code. The hierarchical state machine approach made the new code smaller, more robust, and much easier to maintain and extend.
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