Mastering Embedded Linux Programming: Create fast and reliable embedded solutions with Linux 5.4 and the Yocto Project 3.1 (Dunfell)

Caveat - I work for a software company that is mentioned in the book, which is how I became acquainted with one of the authors. So I probably have some biases.This book could easily be a college textbook. In a good way - a textbook that reads well and that you keep as a handy reference. The book covers a wide gamut - from bootloaders to kernels to developing with Yocto to profiling & tracing. It's a good progression. It definitely demystified some concepts for me, especially related to kernels. Even though I skimmed some chapters, later chapters still made sense - a sign of good writing.So who is this book for? IMHO, it's for people that are familiar with at least a few of the concepts (chapters) in the book. But want to learn the concepts & details in the other chapters, and generally go deeper. And importantly, it's the kind of book where you can read it as you need it e.g. read a few relevant chapter when you have a related work project coming up.

I'm an embedded developer that usually prefers bare metal systems. I can usually wrap my head around the entire stack and understand every single instruction that executes on my MCU. But for practical reasons, you need embedded Linux in many products and I've always struggled to be very productive as I've found the knowledge-base to be fragmented and impenetrable, as my foundation in the guts of Linux is cursory at best.I purchased this book hoping to get more comfortable. I've only spent a few hours on the weekends with it so far, but its demystified many topics that I had hacked my way through in the past. The u-boot section, for example, gives me a very basic explanation of what's happening and how to get things done. As I've paged through other sections, I can see that there's a wonderful mix of "here's what happening" and "how do you get things done".I'm looking forward to going deeper in the book and hopefully setting up a Yocto project for my favorite board.

If you are new to embedded linux, it’s a great book to get started with.

I just started with this book 3-4 days ago, on the day it was released. There are still a number of errata that exist in the book--which I find very disappointing, as this was a significant problem with the second edition (which I also purchased). I've gotten most of the way through chapter 2 at this point, but find myself spending more time reporting errata than I do actually READING the material. Very frustrating indeed.That all said, I'm giving this title 4-stars because it does seem to have some very good content. The problem seems to be that, as far as I can tell, there have been significant changes in the various tools since the time the book was written. Case-in-point: The crosstool-ng build procedure(s) discussed in chapter 2. It simply doesn't work as written, because the expat dependency download fails. And since the build script depends upon expat, you cannot get past that point. The issue seems to be that the version referenced in the script (v2.2.6) has been deprecated due to security issues, in favor of v2.3.0. However unless you want to spend a significant amount of time trying to debug hideously complicated bash scripts, you're pretty much out of luck.So sadly, for me anyway, this new edition still seems to have significant issues for people who would like to actually try to work through all the steps the author(s) direct you to try.UPDATE: For those people struggling with the expat issue in the crosstool-ng build (Chapter 2), you can use this work-around:1) Open the .config file in the main crosstool-ng directory, and edit this file2) There is a reference to CT_EXTAL_V_2_2 around line 673. Change this to CT_EXTAL_V_2_33) There is a reference to CT_EXPAT_VERSION="2.2.6" around line 675. Change this to CT_EXPAT_VERSION="2.3.0".I didn't need to make any other changes, and the "bin/ct-ng build" command successfully downloaded and compiled all the dependencies. At least it did for my system (Ubuntu 18.04, fresh installation for the book). NOTE: If you run the distclean command and then menuconfig to re-configure your build for the QEMU option, you'll need to re-edit the .config file as noted above, as it gets regenerated back to the default expat 2.2.6 dependency. You can also of course go into the bash scripts and find where expat 2.2.6 is being specified. Good luck with that--as I gave up looking through all those hideously complicated bash build scripts, and simply edited the .config file as mentioned.In retrospect, my initial impression of only 3-stars wasn't fair to the book--as many of the issues I've seen thus far were out of the hands of the author(s). Therefore I've upgraded my initial rating to 4-stars. In fact as I continue through the book I'm very impressed by the amount of information it contains.

The Author and the book does a great job of explaining how to engage with embedded programming. The book also walks through simple canned toolsets to more expansive tool sets. I am very pleased with this. Thank you Frank Vasquez , Chris Simmonds for producing the volume of work.

If you are starting working in embedded Linux this book which would be a great help to make sense of building the root file system.

Nothing to dislike. Just recommend to read from cover to cover and backwards and forwards