Mastering Embedded Linux Programming: Create fast and reliable embedded solutions with Linux 5.4 and the Yocto Project 3.1 (Dunfell), 3rd Edition

A good, solid book book detailing how to create embedded Linux systems, mainly concentrating on the Yocto build system but it does touch on Buildroot and has a section on how to roll your own.I have not had the time to read it all yet but the sections i have read, have been clear and instructive.I bought this book to pair with a Coursera course I was taking and it was a good match.

I straight away got the impression that the author knows their stuff, and is a pretty decent writer. I'm not going to go over the contents as you can see that here yourself. I got stuck in chapter 2 for a hour or so because there have been changes to the crosstool-ng software since the book came out (they are easily solved just use the latest branch and ignore the 'git checkout crosstool-ng-1.24.0' line on page 26.(Haven't fully completed the book so can't say for sure there's nothing else)my one gripe is I feel you really have to buy a beagleboard black to get the benefit of all the examples, and although they are relatively inexpensive £50, it would have been much better for me if the examples used Raspberry Pi as I have a bunch of these and I'm much more familiar with them, the pico model is only £10An existing review here complains that the examples of actual source code are not C/C++ but Python, so if you're expecting a book with many examples of low level POSIX system code then this isn't it, but you do get to know how to cross compile for a target machine using GCC so when you do get to start writing C/C++ your toolchain will be set up. Python is not a bad choice, much of Linux utils are now built with python scripts which is perfectly performative for most use cases, obviously if you want to write a video card driver or something you'll want to write in C/C++ but if you're doing that you're likely beyond this book anyway.Python is interpreted not compiled but JIT compiling source code into an executable on demand is very common now and has numerous benefits in terms of maintenance and development time with the latest interpreters being 10x faster than the previous generation they usually performative enough, unless you have some special reason for demanding absolute peak possible performance you wont regret not having to recompile everything because a 3rd party depenency changed, or new revision of hardware breaks your compiled code.

I was taking a udemy course on this topic and wanted another reference. I'm finding the material in the book a much better resource. Goes into just the right amount of detail that I've needed. The versions used in the examples are slightly out of date at this point, but not long enough that you can't find the LTS versions of everything and still get them all to work following the sample commands.

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.

An amazing book, it gives a brief (but good enough) overview of most topics you need to know to get acquainted with embedded Linux. Should you later decide to dive deeper into one of them, you'll know what you should be looking for.

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.

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