Bare Metal C: Embedded Programming for the Real World

Interested in getting this to work on Windows? Well, you are going to need to install three things that suck:- STM32, the main development component, which you will have to obtain from a poorly-maintained, slow-to-the-point-of-broken, website that looks like it was thrown together in 1997.- MinGW, where the current 64-bit installer looks like it's being flagged for containing malware- MSYS2Maybe this is better on Linux, where gcc is easy to obtain, but that still leaves you with STM32.I really want to like this book, but my patience with getting a dev environment up and running is wearing thin. If you buy an Arduino starter kit you can run your first program 15 minutes after you open the box. Why put up with this nonsense?

Not bare-metal at all. Most code examples are plain old C, with no hardware involved. The few hardware-related code examples use a hardware abstraction layer, obfuscating away the actual bare metal hardware details the book is supposedly written for. Misleading book title. Money wasted buying the book and the recommended hardware.

I got about halfway through this book before I realized it was a wash. I had to check the publication date several times to make sure that it was recently written. STM32 System Workbench is essentially deprecated, yet this book recommends you use it( I was never even able to successfully download it). STM directed me to download their newer IDE, which paired okay with the book but was still way off in many aspects. I ended up just setting up CLion to handle the board which worked decently well. None of the code examples worked in this setup so I ended up having to translate 90% of what I was seeing to *more modern* equivalents provided by STM and others(by the way, many of these more modern equivalents were written 5+ years ago and still apply better than this book). Several requirements are just not described in the book, and it may have been easier to handle this from a Linux/Mac machine, but I wanted to do this work on my Windows machine.No Starch Press makes some great reads, but this is not one of them...

Bom

Even the installation of the fringe group software is difficult, since the registration process turns out to be a, öhm, non-functioning 90s homepage with excessive use of Java Script. Why should you use the manufacturer's free software? The use of a HAL also contradicts the title. It's a good example of how you can go wrong for 50 years without realizing it, but only in the USA can you make money out of it. Normally NoStarch's books are of better quality and it is to be hoped that this book was just a blip. Otherwise, my good impression of this publisher suffers in the long term.