Didn’t expect to find any books on our outing yesterday, but I had a pleasant surprise. Last week I finished my previous book on embedded Linux, which was a great case-study-esque intro, and Embedded Linux Primer will likely be a wonderful follow-up. Some of the chapters that caught my eye:
- Storage Considerations
- Systems on Chip
- Bootloaders
- Device driver basics
- Filesystems
- Busybox
- Development tools beyond gdb: cscope, strace (and others)
- Kernel Debugging Techniques
- Open Source Build Systems
- udev
Test-Driven Development for Embedded C was a surprise as well. To be honest, I’ve never done much unit-testing for PHP or other web apps. And I’m not sure of the best ways to perform testing for C apps given the added step of compilation, so this book should prove quite valuable. Even if my next job doesn’t require TDD experience, it should help me write better code.
I might add that I’ve purchased a few PHP and web programming (Ruby on Rails) books over the years, but none have excited me as much as my recent finds. Web apps don’t capture my imagination, and I tire of thinking about projects that involve yet another website. So it’s time I left that task to others with more capable, passionate hands.
Given yesterday’s purchase, it might be that I put down Linux Kernel Development in favor of Embedded Linux Primer for the time being. LKD walks through the design of Linux while teaching Operating System concepts. It’s a great review of what I learned in college, but might not prepare me for another job as thoroughly as some of the others.
Speaking of the job search… I intend to showcase what I’m learning via new project, but haven’t begun yet. However, I may be waiting forever for a great project idea, so the best way to kickstart the momentum is probably to buy a SoC, maybe some sort of Arduino project board, and start playing. That should probably be my task for tomorrow.