Product: 1784392537

Considering how widely embedded Linux is used, we might expect more books on the subject. In fact, there are precious few, and it seems fewer are published now than ten years ago. Why is that? There is no shortage of books on other popular programming topics. It may be that writing competently about embedded Linux requires broader knowledge and greater skill.

This new book Mastering Embedded Linux Programming is a surprisingly good book. The author clearly has deep experience and it shows in the selection, organization, and presentation of embedded Linux topics which include building cross toolchains, U-Boot, the Linux kernel, and Buildroot to generate the root filesystem. You need a platform to run these things and the author wisely offers examples on Beaglebone Black for actual hardware and QEMU for software platform emulation.

I have experience with these technologies and platforms, but had to scrape up and adapt information as best I could at the time, so I can readily recognize coherent recipes that bring it all together. This book does that exceedingly well and should prove most useful to any experienced or aspiring embedded Linux developer.

I am not just reading the book. I am working through the examples, trying the build examples on an inexpensive $5/month cloud server. (Tip - If you have limited memory on the build server, such as 512 MB on a cloud server, configure 2 GB Linux swap space since that is needed by the Linux build tools.) I have found the examples to be entirely accurate so far, which is uncommon for embedded Linux guides and speaks well of the care taken by the author and technical reviewers.

This book is professionally written, accurate, and highly recommended.

With the popularity of embedded Debian Linux on Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, and many other embedded Linux platforms, we could use an embedded Linux book with Debian concentration, particularly with regard to the intricacies of the Debian package build system and deployment to IoT devices. I would love to see this author take on such a project.
Rating: 5
1784392537
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