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Ask Slashdot: Sources For Firmware and Hardware Books?
First time accepted submitter cos(0) writes "Between O'Reilly, Wrox, Addison-Wesley, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, and many others, software developers have a wide variety of literature about languages, patterns, practices, and tools. Many publishers even offer subscriptions to online reading of the whole collection, exposing you to things you didn't even know you don't know — and many of us learn more from these publishers than from a Comp Sci curriculum. But what about publishers and books specializing in tech underneath software — like VHDL, Verilog, design tools, and wire protocols? In particular, best practices, modeling techniques, and other skills that separate a novice from an expert?"
Perhaps this would be the book you need? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickblack/the-finest-machine :D
I am an embedded software engineer who does some hardware/electrical engineering too. Unfortunately there is very little material on this subject specifically. Basically you need to learn how to code in C (not C++ or C#, raw C), learn some electronics and then maybe learn VHDL/Verilog as well. You then put it all together in your own mind.
It is really hard to recruit people with those skills so they are worth having. You will need some hands on experience though. You can simulate wire protocols and some hardware but none of the simulations are particularly good practice for real life, and employers will want examples of work anyway. A university level course would be best.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not a book, but this book chapter is more-or-less compulsory reading for someone planning to get into HDL programming:
A structured VHDL design method
Pirate Party UK
and many of us learn more from these publishers than from a Comp Sci curriculum
Not me, man. And, don't get me wrong, I love pragprog and I worship O'Reilly and NoStarch. Hell, I review books for them on Slashdot! But no book would have been able to teach me about automata theory or linear algebra and differential equations like my college courses did. I'm sorry but I must argue that there's a lot of application and implementation to be gleaned from these books -- not so much on the theory and foundational concepts. At least for me there's something really difficult about reading a book about really "far out there" concepts and truly understanding them without human intervention. Maybe I'm just stupid but I find the best tech books show me "little jumps" while my college courses were the only way I could make "the big jumps" in knowledge quickly enough.
Plus, going to a liberal arts college meant general requirements that furthered me along in ethics, philosophy, etc more than these books did. I wouldn't go selling a college education short even though it seems to be the popular thing to bash these days.
My work here is dung.
I read the free ebook titled Free Range VHDL out of pure interest. Found it will written, but as I'm no engineer I cannot tell if it's exactly what the poster is asking for. But might be worth a read. http://www.freerangefactory.org/
- Grab a couple books on C/C++ and Verilog. I highly recommend "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design", great for both learning and for reference. For C/C++, I've always been a fan of the Sam's "Learn __ in 24 hours" books.
- Get yourself a FPGA development card, so you can get some "hardware play" in and familiarize yourself with some development tools. I have an Altera DE1 educational card that's a few years old, but it's got endless blocks on it (displays, LEDs, buttons, flash, SDRAM, VGA, sound... you name it) which makes it a great little card for embedded system learning. There's a whole set of Verilog and Nios (embedded processor) tutorials available for it, and lots of online hackers who have ported x86 processors (Zet project), hardware emulations of the NES, etc... to it. Xilinx and Actel also make some nice evaluation boards that seem to be targeted fairly often by hobbyists.
Other than that... you can study the heck out of wire protocols, but you'll probably forget everything you learn unless you end up implementing it. You're better off trying to learn as many general things as you can - how to create well organized C/C++ and Verilog code, making your designs meet timing and such - so that if you end up having to implement something, you've got the basics already in place and don't need too much incremental learning. Also if you have some fun ideas for FPGA projects, implement your heart out - that sort of stuff looks great on a resume.
Good luck!
There isn't any. It's VMs all the way down now. Hardware is so 20th century.
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Don't forget the appnotes- those are great for picking up pieces of passed down lore that you won't otherwise be exposed to unless you hang out with EE / Hardware types. The problem for me is gaining awareness that a class of parts exists so that I can read the appnotes for them.
This is where I started about a year ago:
http://www.fpga4fun.com/
Got a Xilinx dev kit, and it didn't take me too many weeks to get my project up to a stage where other people started using it.
Besides programming, a background in general electronics does help. Even if you're coding in a somewhat C-like language, it's nothing like a sequential program, but a description of hardware with real, physical parallelity. To me, it often helps to look at a circuit diagram to understand some debugging issues.
Data sheets from chip manufacturers are essential for some of the trickier points. If you need to choose between the two largest players, I recommend Altera over Xilinx, as they are somewhat more open, but mostly there are no huge differences.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.