Computers as Components: Principles of Embedded Computing System Design

This is a terrible textbook. The book manages to be overly verbose yet simultaneously too shallow to convey any meaningful knowledge. The author's style is dry and lacks impact, sapping the excitement out of embedded systems. Wolf may be knowledgeable, but she is entirely unable to pass that knowledge on to her readers. The text is rife with errors, both technical and grammatical. This includes examples explicitly designed to clarify a point, which are consequently become even more confusing. It is hard to believe this is a 4th edition. The editors clearly got paid to fall asleep to Wolf's coma-inducing writing style. The author has chosen to make extensive use of UML diagrams, but these often include a questionable choice of components with inconsistent/unintuitive associations. More than once, I was more confused about an example architecture after reviewing the associated UML. Similarly, most of the exercises are lazy, existing more as chapter padding than as actual aids in understanding. Instructors, if you care at all about your students, please stop selecting this text for your courses. If you're learning on your own, pick up a more practical volume on embedded systems (e.g., Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software ) and separate texts on operating systems / computer architecture. I plan to sell this as soon as my class is over.

This book was filled with errors, and the solution manual had many errors as well. Trying to learn from this book was more frustrating than enlightening. Even when the book wasn't flat out wrong about something, it gave incomplete descriptions of principles, such as using equations without explaining what some variables mean, or not giving equations at all, then referencing the non-existent equation. I constantly found myself referencing other textbooks, or the internet for more complete explanations. Overall, this book is one of the worst textbooks I have ever read. I have a hard time understanding why a professor would ever choose to use this book, as there countless books around that are better. Honestly, not using any book would be better than using this book.

Like other reviews say, text is full of errors (mostly in examples meant to clarify a concept, which is particularly frustrating) and is written incredibly poorly. This is dry even for a computer science textbook. The most you get out of it is which terms you should google so that another source can explain the concept better.

And it isn't a particularly good one. It was boring to read, and not incredibly helpful. Google will get you much farther than this will.

the book is a total miss, and has nothing to do with real computer Science