G. Jack Lipovski (1944–2017)

This is a really solid textbook, but very much demonstrates its age. Even when I used the 68HC11 back in 2003 in my intro to embedded class, we did not have such a need to interface it with many other components to achieve useful functionality. These days, with so many amazing 8-bit microcontrollers on the market, rather than interfacing in new memory or I/O capability, a different chip can be purchased instead.

I found myself thinking "why the heck would I do this" so many times while reading this book. I guess I'm privileged to be able to design embedded systems in a day and age where I don't have to use external components to trigger interrupts, expand memory, or even to use I/O pins on a microcontroller. (Honestly, I don't know why I would need to do it even on the 68HC11, which, from my recollection, is a pretty robust MCU.)

This textbook focuses on the 68HC11 and programming in assembly. While most of the topics are generalizable in theory, the focus on a specific architecture (common when the book was published, much less common today) and a low-level language makes this book less useful even as an introduction to topics of parallel/serial I/O, ADC, timing, etc.… (mere)