microprocessors and system design

I certainly got more information about programming the 8051 microcontroller from this book than from Predko's 'Programming and Customizing the 8051', or for that matter, any other 8051 book I've managed to get my hands on (Steve Sokolowsky's "Assembly Language Basics" and Boyet and Katz's 'The 8051 Programming, Interfacing, Applications. Ok, that's only 2 more, but hey- it's the best out of 4). I couldn't figure ANYTHING out from them. Most of it is handled in a nice, logical manner. I wish SOMEONE whould just make a SHORT, CLEAR, CONCISE, BARE-BONES book of just what is important. If they did it write, you'd have EVERYTHING that was important and it wouldn't even be 30 pages long. These people all spend SO many words descriping a few simple concepts that are OBVIOUS, and then when I try to find what's important, I get an impenetrable bog of words. Even when I find it, then, it's explained in a manner much more complicated than the underlying concept, and if I finally get it, I just say to myself "ALL he had to say was THIS, and he only had to say it ONCE!". If I had could FIGURE OUT everything I wanted to know from the effusive sea of words comprising any of these sources I'd tried, I might even write a book myself, but you can't write about what you don't know, and if I could find a good book OUT THERE, the world wouldn't NEED another one! Well, maybe I could get all the info I needed from a good one and make a great one. But still. You'd think someone would do a better job than this.

The book may be considered as a basic tool for designing an embedded system. It spreads in almost all the areas of nowadays microcontrolled devices. The book is based on Intel's 8051, but the algorithms described may be implemented basically for any microcontroller. The book is not suitable for people who doesn't have basic knowledge in programming in Assembler and C, but it may be used by people who are making their first steps in embedded design. At the end of the book there is a full list of all the Assembler commands for 8051. My recomendation is to put an example after each command. It will be very helpful.
As a whole, the book is great expecially with all the diagrams in it and my opinion is that every engineer involved in embedded system design should have it on its bookshelf.

Well, to start of with - it was ONLY written by Karakehayov, the others are just there for show. Which means that the English language in the books is a bit bad. And the author (or publicher) didn't take the time to structure the book very well. BUT if you can live with that the books got GREAT diagrams, which if you can understand them, makes the book invaluble for designing a complicated embedded system or software.

The book also takes emphasis on assambler, only one of the chapters is a review of c programming.