Book excerpt: A classic book for professional embedded system designers, now in an affordable paperback edition. This book distills the experience of more than 90 design reviews on real embedded systems into a set of bite-size lessons learned in the areas of software development process, requirements, architecture, design, implementation, verification & validation, and critical system properties. This is a concept book rather than a cut-and-paste the code book.Each chapter describes an area that tends to be a problem in embedded system design, symptoms that tend to indicate you need to make changes, the risks of not fixing problems in this area, and concrete ways to make your embedded system software better. Each of the 29 chapters is self-sufficient, permitting developers with a busy schedule to cherry-pick the best ideas to make their systems better right away.If you are relatively new to the area but have already learned the basics, this book will be an invaluable asset for taking your game to the next level. If you are experienced, this book provides a way to fill in any gaps. Once you have mastered this material, the book will serve as a source of reminders to make sure you haven't forgotten anything as you plan your next project. This is version 1.1 with some minor revisions from the 2010 hardcover edition. This is a paperback print-on-demand edition produced by Amazon.