Practical Embedded Controllers: Design and Troubleshooting with the Motorola 68HC11

Rating:
Summary: For the manager Not for the engineer
Review: I've been a hardware engineer for six years and have seen many of my designs vanish into firmware. It was time to learn how to program a microcontroller, but this book was not much help.

The index often points to the wrong page - close, but usually a page or two off. There are no appendixes for quick reference. The illustrations vaguely correlate to the text.

The chapter on the assembly language begins: "This book is not intended to be a manual on programming.." and it truly does not teach assembly. There are several example codes with virtually no explanation and there are no programs with which to practise.

Much of the chapter on the microcontroller (68hc11 used as the basis) talks about component placement on the PCB or noise, which is nice to know but not fundamental in learning how to program the chip. The rest of this chapter is a gloss over which concludes: "Although the reader may never program or design a microcontroller system..." Then why am I reading it? Well, you might read it if you worked WITH a microcontroller engineer but were NOT a microcontroller engineer and never intended to become one.

There are enough buzz words in here to make you sound good, but if you really want to learn the 68hc11, find another book.