Ask Slashdot: Sources For Firmware and Hardware Books? 88
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?"
Gaisler VHDL style (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [gaisler.com]
Not Me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
fpga4fun (Score:4, Interesting)
This is where I started about a year ago:
http://www.fpga4fun.com/ [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.