Designing Embedded Communications Software

✍ Scribed by T. Sridhar, T. Sridar

• Publisher: CMP
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 245
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Yet, amazingly, this book could have been adequate or even good. But that would require a different publisher, I suspect. OK, one step at a time:

First and foremost you need to know (the others here have already mentioned this) that this book is very basic. Now, that's no great sin to be basic, provided it's made clear to the potential buyer that it's a book on basics. So, the title should have been something like "A Pleasantly Light Introduction to Design of [etc., etc.]" OK, suppose that's done, would then the book be good? Nope. Why? Because it's written asswise, that's why. Btw, the author definitely knows his stuff, he's competent, that much is clear TO SOMEONE WHO ALREADY KNOWS THE SAME STUFF! (And therefore does not need this book.)

But a newbie -- who appears to be the only kind of reader who could benefit from this kind of book -- will not understand one page of it. The book is miserably under-edited: it's incoherent, rambling, randomly composed, revoltingly imprecise, laden with unexplicated industry jargon; the narrative jumps from topic to topic in the same paragraph; suddenly and randomly it changes from conceptual material to details of the lowest possible level totaly irrelevant in the previously assumed context, and so on and so forth. And it's not proofread (as the others here mentioned)... although, considering the rest of what's wrong with this book, I almost hesitate to mention this.

Yet, like I've said, the author is competent, and so with a sufficient editorial contribution a decent book COULD have been produced. The guy knows a lot, but he's not a writer: his knowledge should have been carefully and deliberately extracted from him and then structured, laid out, articulated in an appropriate manner by a competent technical writer. But hey, that's CMP we're dealing with here, not O'Reilly or Morgan Kaufmann, right? Think up a catchy title, print the crap on the cardboard-thickness paper (to make 200 pages look impressive), ship it to the stores, 49.95 a piece... 'nouf said.

(As an aside: It is interesting to contrast this failure of a book to the similar recent "Network Algorithmics", by Varghese, from MK. A big difference!)