This book is a very practical, and effective guide in using low-cost tools for embedded system development. Extensive tips, and walk-throughs are given. It is a highly recommended hand-on book.

This is an excellent book. I bought it sight-unseen and have been very pleased. The book takes you step-by-step through bringup of an inexpensive ARM7 evaluation board, first using assembly and then using C language with the Newlib embedded C library. The freely available GNU tool chain is used, so you can get up and running without investing in big-ticket commercial development tools.

The book is based on the Atmel EB40 evaluation board. The pricing sweet spot no longer favors this board, so I bought the EB40A instead. I had to figure out differences in the memory map, PIO addresses for the LEDs, and USART clock enable, but this was straightforward after Google searches for the EB40A.

I highly recommend this book. The technical content is accurate, and it is well-written. It appears to be written by an embedded developer, for embedded developers. Other embedded books I have read recently seem organized around marketing objectives, and are over generalized. Those books are interesting but not very useful in the practical sense.

Edwards' book is useful in the practical sense. I hope he continues to write. I'm ready with my credit card when his next book is published.