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Rating: 
Summary: Appropriately titled
Review: Description of reviewer: Computer Science (BS Hons). Commercial software engineering experience of 1.5 years. Experience with x86 assembler, VGA graphics subsystem, C/C++, Win32/MFC, WDM, and Java. Completely new to embedded systems. Reviewer's goals: Looking to learn basic theories on what makes a good real-time operating system (RTOS). Ideally, I wanted to gain a good background for determining whether WinCE 3.0 is a viable RTOS, and when it should/could be used. Did I achieve my goal? No. Only chapters 1 and 2 provided any theory chunks, and even then it was more common sense than an epiphany. My fault for assuming that I would abstract tested theory from an instructional handbook. I still learned a few nibbles about what a good RTOS needs to have though. Do I recommend this book to others? Yes - but match your expectations with what it delivers. While I did not achieve my goal of understanding RTOS requirements, the book does provide a nice guide to how one would build a real-time embedded system from components. Provides good insights into the types of questions one needs to ask when building such a system. The methodology is not philosophical and steers clear from that rancor and leaves the reader to balance their intellect, creativity, and intuition for achieving their needs and wants in a real-time system. Consider this book to be appropriately titled. It's a guide. It's not a definitive guide. It doesn't tell you, "do this for this application"... Indeed, I don't recommend this book if you need to create some kind of commercial embedded system. This book is for learning and toying around. Now, if you intend to do anything with Phar Lap's ETS kernel, this book is a great beginner's resource for you. The usefulness is a bit limited because the lessons that really apply outside of the ETS kernel are really theoretically based. Theory is extremely useful, but RTS theory may be a bit much for a beginner since there's a lot of "bla bla bla, my idea is better" - just visit comp.realtime if you have any doubts. As an instructional manual, this book does a good job at being agnostic about RTS philosophies and evades a lot of "this is the best thingy" type claims. As a result it does well instructing on basics (versus indoctrinating), but you'll need more if you want to do anything really useful. Were this book to have delved more into a couple of strong RTS theories and why there are so many arguments in different areas, I would have rated it a 5. This would have allowed the book to have use beyond the novice stage of embedded development. Were this book to have used focused on an open RTOS, like embedded linux, (which consequently means there's a lot of additional wealth provided from geeks on the net), I would have given this a 4. Alas, this book gets a 3. It's nowhere near being as bad as a 2. It's a solid 3 because it's usefulness is limited but it gets the job done in teaching basics.
Rating: 
Summary: More like a huge advert for proprietary software
Review: I applaud the goal as stated in the book's title, and we very much need such a book. For me, this isn't it. I felt that their synopsis claims were not entirely honest: not only is this book based entirely on a proprietary operating system, but the learning version included with the book has been hamstrung to protect the full version. This makes sense, but their chosen method was to prevent you from being able to save your programming to disk or ROM; in other words, so that it can't be embedded. Seems difficult at best to learn embedded programming with software that can't be embedded. And the retail version of the tools on which this book is based cost a fortune. I suppose you could filter for more generally applicable information, but for me it just wasn't worth it. If you were going to pony up the dough for their OS, it would definitely be useful, but in that case they should give it to you as a manual!
Rating:
Summary: Appropriately titled
Review: What this book is: An introduction to developing for single-board computer (SBC) platforms (Intel x86), including interesting topics like connecting to pushbuttons and LCD displays. I personally found the book very interesting, as it's focused on x86-based embedded systems, rather than traditional embedded processors. What this book is not: It's not about real-time programming - it's about SBC programming and the nuances of embedded systems. Coverage of true real-time techniques is very cursory, as mentioned here in another review about scheduling (likewise for subjects like de-bouncing of inputs and watchdog circuitry). On the positive side, there is a progressive collection of examples that implement each of the principles presented. The code is included on the CD, along with a demo development library to build the examples. By including the demo library, the reader can get kick-started, even if they ultimately switch to another kernel. On the negative side, the entire book is a heavily product-specific discussion around the PharLap RTOS kernel included on the CD (which is a crippled license for prototyping only). All the examples are dependent upon the reader using the PharLap kernel and a Windows-based machine with Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler. In short: All in all, I found this book was a worthy addition to my library, and a great introduction to some of the issues and techniques that are unique to programming embedded PCs. I'm glad I bought it, but I would have been happier if it had included coverage of other kernels (like embedded Linux), and an intro to some of the alternatives to x86-based CPUs. I was also disappointed that PharLap disabled Borland C++ support in the demo license - the logic for this escapes me.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book, Wrong Title
Review: What this book is: An introduction to developing for single-board computer (SBC) platforms (Intel x86), including interesting topics like connecting to pushbuttons and LCD displays. I personally found the book very interesting, as it's focused on x86-based embedded systems, rather than traditional embedded processors. What this book is not: It's not about real-time programming - it's about SBC programming and the nuances of embedded systems. Coverage of true real-time techniques is very cursory, as mentioned here in another review about scheduling (likewise for subjects like de-bouncing of inputs and watchdog circuitry). On the positive side, there is a progressive collection of examples that implement each of the principles presented. The code is included on the CD, along with a demo development library to build the examples. By including the demo library, the reader can get kick-started, even if they ultimately switch to another kernel. On the negative side, the entire book is a heavily product-specific discussion around the PharLap RTOS kernel included on the CD (which is a crippled license for prototyping only). All the examples are dependent upon the reader using the PharLap kernel and a Windows-based machine with Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler. In short: All in all, I found this book was a worthy addition to my library, and a great introduction to some of the issues and techniques that are unique to programming embedded PCs. I'm glad I bought it, but I would have been happier if it had included coverage of other kernels (like embedded Linux), and an intro to some of the alternatives to x86-based CPUs. I was also disappointed that PharLap disabled Borland C++ support in the demo license - the logic for this escapes me.
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