All indian reprints of o reilly are printed in grayscale. Embedded software is in almost every electronic device designed today. There is software hidden away inside our watches, microwaves, vcrs, cellular telephonesand pagers, the military uses embedded software to guide smart missiles and detect enemy aircraft, communications satellites, space probesand modern medicine would be nearly impossible without it. Of course, someone has to write all that softwareand there are thousands of computer scientists, electrical engineersand other professionals who actually do. Each embedded system is unique and highly customized to the application at hand. As a result, embedded systems programming is a widely varying field that can take years to master. However, if you have some programming experience and are familiar with c or c plus plus, you re ready to learn how to write embedded software. The hands on, no nonsense style of this book will help you get started by offering practical advice from someone who s been in your shoes and wants to help you learn quickly. The techniques and code examples presented here are directly applicable to real world embedded software projects of all sorts. Even if you ve done some embedded programming before, you ll still benefit from the topics in this book, which include testing memory chips quickly and efficientlywriting and erasing flash memoryverifying nonvolatile memory contents with crcsinterfacing to on chip and external peripheralsdevice driver design and implementationoptimizing embedded software for size and speed so whether you re writing your first embedded program, designing the latest generation of hand held whatchamacalitsor simply managing the people who do, this book is for you.