[ML-General] Fwd: BBB again

[david]

Not sure if this went out before.


I promised some comments on Derek Molloy's new book about the BBB.  Ok, 
here ya go.

It's about 600 pages, listed at $35 on the cover and it's $25 from 
Amazon.  It is an awesome work!  I've got a couple dozen dog=eared pages 
for things to dig deeper into.  :)

The first 100 pages or so are a good (brief) intro into Linux/UNIX in 
general so can be skipped over unless you want a review of the really 
basic stuff.

Then the fun begins.  There is even a chapter on electrical/electronic 
interfacing to the BBB to get stuff done and he goes into which 
components (resistors, transistors, etc.)  to use, when, and why.  There 
is an adequate section on the device tree, how to boot from the SD card 
instead of the onboard flash, using a desktop for comms/control along 
with virtualization. Also, some discussion of IDE's but Qt is -really- 
glossed over even though he has a 45 minute video on YouTube about it.  
I wish there was a lot more meat to the Qt topic, but sadly, no.

There is a pretty good section about using the BBB as a stand-alone web 
server, especially for passing it's sensor data to the world.

There is discussion about using C and C++ programming with it, with a 
brief intro into Posix Threads if you need "concurrent" subtasks all 
under one program's control.

There is a nice chapter on using the two onboard RISC processors and how 
to program them.  They can run independently of and communicate with 
tasks running in Linux on the main processor and he explains how to use 
shared memory for that, along with a bit of discussion of using 
semaphores.  This is the slickest and briefest discussion

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