Rating: 
Summary: This Rating May Change
Review: I assume I'm the real target reader for this book. I've been programming microprocessors and microcontrollers for 20+ years now, but I'm a hardware dunce. The book starts pretty much from Square 1 of simple electronics. The challenge of writing such chapters is to remember what it's like for a raw novice. An author should explain things and not skip ahead. What I really wanted this book for was the chapter on simple Electronics rather than all the rest. It could use work. Current is represented in equations as "I". The author neglects to mention that. He just springs it on you in an equation. He also doesn't explain how he got the formula for the voltage divider. It's presented as some "magic" formula where he should taken just a few more steps to show how he got the formula (Ohm's Law, plus the bit about current in R1 and R2 being equal). Some of his other descriptions seem vague and incomplete (like inductors). That being said, I did learn stuff from that chapter so it was helpful. I have a feeling many professionals are skipping this chapter and moving on to the meatier ones on how to hook stuff up, so their ratings are higher. There's some sage advice in the book (like disabling the brown-out voltage reset on 3.3V PICs as they are set at 4 volts!). The emphasis is totally on hardware. You won't find any code listings for playing with the devices once it's hooked up, but that should be no problem for the intended audience. But if you were ever sitting there with a microcontroller in one hand and a DC motor on the other and wanting to know how to hook it all up, this is a good book for it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book for beginner
Review: I like this book because it talks briefly about different MICs and interfaces. I gained enough knowledge to build my own embedded computer. I would like to see more books from same author.
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Summary: Very well done ! Way more interesting than I imagined...
Review: I've only read half of it so far, but it's been exceptionally good to this point. I can't say enough about how informative the first chapter "Introduction to computer architecture" was. The author seems excessively leary of noise in the circuit design chapter and a bit picky about how you draw your schematics, but I suppose these things come from experience.(or maybe just being paranoid and anal-retentive!) I may have jumped the gun reviewing it so quickly, but I highly doubt it's going to go bad all the sudden. Great book! :)
Rating:
Summary: Way above average
Review: Some of the O'Reily books really shine and this is one of them. I'm an experienced hardware engineer, but I still got some good tidbits out of this book which is all the more impressive when you consider it's written for a relative beginner. The author does a nice job with both the content and writing style. It covers many topics which are relatively common knowledge among experienced hardware designers but you rarely find in one book. Some of those topics I've never seen in ANY book. There's some good stuff here. That said, it's probably not the ideal book for someone who's already tackled a few successful embedded hardware designs.
Rating:
Summary: Good for the absolute beginner
Review: This book has some good information for the absolute beginner. Most of the information in this book should already be familiar to a person with some experience with Microcontroller development. Data sheets can be found on the Internet for most of the components described in this book. For everything related to the AVR Microcontroller, visit http://www.avrfreaks.net/. They have a GNU C compiler and some cool tools and links.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for All
Review: This book is an exceptional text for anyone interested in electronics and microcontrollers. It provides all the basics and no prerequisites are required. It covers everything from Ohm's Law and resistors to the CAN bus and ethernet. The author also has a skill that few technical writers have: the ability not to bore you to death with the book. It reads well and is not drawn out, the author just gets to the point.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book is great for beginners. It is very informative and easy to read. I like the way the author describes timing diagrams seen in many microcontroller datasheets. I am impressed with his love for the ATMEL AVR microcontroller.
I used this book for a small PIC project.
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Summary: Where has this book been all my career?
Review: Though an EE by training, I've spent over a decade developing software. Of course, writing embedded software does keep me close to the hardware. So I know how to read a schematic and use an oscilloscope to probe the hardware. But I've never actually designed a board of my own. This book gives me the confidence to do so. It belongs on every embedded designer's bookshelf and should soon become a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Where has this book been all my career?
Review: Though an EE by training, I've spent over a decade developing software. Of course, writing embedded software does keep me close to the hardware. So I know how to read a schematic and use an oscilloscope to probe the hardware. But I've never actually designed a board of my own. This book gives me the confidence to do so. It belongs on every embedded designer's bookshelf and should soon become a classic.
Rating:
Summary: Well worth the read
Review: While I don't know if I could build my own embedded device after reading just this book (I don't think I'd be able to this after pretty much any one book), I still felt like this book still delivered on that promise more so than any other single hardware book I've read. So many books gloss over details, either because knowledge is assumed (which is fine in many cases), or because the author doesn't have the detailed knowledge to begin with. And even when the data is in the book, far too often it's exactly that: book data, repackaged information from other sources (often books themselves). It's much better when the knowledge ultimately comes from the author's experiences. Most of the knowledge in this book really seems to be of the latter, and better, variety. I also thought the detailed introductions to a wide range of topics were 'just right' - not too high-level, so they glossed over important details or the underlying fundamentals of how the particular thing worked, but also not so low-level that they assumed knowledge I would have had to go find elsewhere. This goes for a lot of different protocols (RS-232, RS-422, SPI, I2C, USB, and so on) as well as technologies (what's a DSP exactly?).
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