Book Review: For Embedded system designers

29th August 2010
Book Review: For Embedded system designers

8051 Microcontroller: Internals, Instructions, Programming & Interfacing: By Subrata Ghoshal; Pearson Education; Rs 345 ( www.pearsoned.co.in/subrataghoshal  )
For a ‘fabless’ country like India, embedded is the way to go in electronic product design – and many thousands of young Indian programmers have acquired the skills to create the embedded applications that fuel a whole ecosystem of consumer and industry digital products – many with analogue front ends. For them the 8051 microcontroller lies at the epicentre of this product ecosystem – perhaps the most widely used IC of its kind.
Prof Ghosal’s book begins with internal architecture of 8051 and proceeds to elaborate on the insrtruction sets and goes on to explain how the controller can be used to connect with sensors and memory; peripherals and displays.
Efficient power management is fully treated – as is servo motor interfaces. There are numerous examples of controller programming in C. With some 30 questions at the end of each of the 26 chapters, the book does double duty as self help guide and class room text. Like all Pearson titles there are helpful aids and additional tools to be found in separate online sections for teacher and student ( see our web link above).
The author is professor in the department of Embedded System Design at the International Institute of Information Technology, Pune and has served earlier with St Thomas College of Engineering Kolkata and BITS Pilani.
A well organised no-nonsense guide for embedded programmers who are learning the skill in college -- or doing it in the real world.
- Anand Parthasarathy  Aug 30 2010