USB Embedded Hosts: The Developer's Guide

USB devices are ubiquitous today. Many devices from cellphones, game consoles to televisions, and etc. come with some USB port. USB provides an easy and seamless means of communicating with peripheral devices. This book presents a clear and concise explanation of how to use USB in an embedded device. It demystifies the USB specification into something as simple as 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C. This book is ideally suite for anyone building a device and want to include USB. Also, if you are an embedded engineer, this will be your ultimate Holy Grill for USB. I will also recommend getting yourself a copy of USB Complete as well.

It is good at describing how to use USB from within Linux ( 'C' programming & tools ) on embedded systems.If, like me, you are looking for a lower level understanding, then this is not the book for you - no H/W or driver level..... go for his "USB Complete" instead.

Book is OK, although I expected something what would enable me to write my own USB embedded host using a decent microcontroller. Instead of that I got to know something about embedded Linux (but not very much).

Does an excellent job of explaining USB host and how to navigate thru it, with great examples to boot. I would buy more of her books.

What I expected from the book: how to communicate with devices on the USB bus via the USB functionality of the kernel; layout of USB packets, USB configurations, interfaces, etc. E.g., the book promises to explain how to access files on USB drives. I was expecting an explanation and sample code to read or write a file on a UMASS device with an arbitrary file-system (e.g., FATx) via low-level USB transactions.What the book provides: random isolated references and details to tiny, out of large picture, parts of the USB protocol (very small portion of the material) and then a description of how to communicate with USB periferals via standard application API-s. E.g., how do you write a file on a USB device? Surprise, surprise: fopen(), fwrite(), fclose(). Not what I paid N bucks for a book about USB embedded hosts.Oh, and the book tries to explain data frame formats via plain prose, like "bmRequestType is a bit field [...]; Bit 7 names the direction of data flow for data in the Data stage...." There is no table indicating the layout of the packet.There is one chapter though that is relevant: chapter 10 includes some sample code about using libusb.If you are new to linux and embedded and don't mind reading a random mixture of application-level API-s about how to communicate with devices (that may or may not be connected via a USB bus) then you might have better luck with the book.Bad news for me is that there appears to be no book that would provide what I expected.

While probably an excellent source for anyone building an embedded Linux host, everyone else need not apply. Some slight mention is given to CPU manufacturers supplied libraries, but nothing for anyone hoping to start from scratch.

all ok

Too many USB project.... This is one of three books I ordered from Amazon to break the wall of misunderstanding.

If what you want is just to mess around with usb devices (simple stuff) then you don't need this book, you're fine using the free usblib. If you really want to use USB at a low level and you need to build your own USB implementations, then this book and USB Complete also from Jan Axelson are for you!The only thing I didn't like this book is the lack of one example that could go from the hardware (building our PCB with a USB Controller) to the implementation part (although it covers very well the software implementation part, it as tons of code examples).The book is good, but you have to read it in the shortest time you can or else you'll end up forgetting most of its information, but that's normal with all complex specifications.

This book basically describes how to use USB devices on a Linux host, once the correct device drivers have been loaded. So you get a lot of stuff about how to install packages (using apt-get), compile code, and then how to use mice, keyboards, network adaptors etc. from C. The title is somewhat misleading, because the USB part is largely irrelevant in this book - it simply assumes that you have the correct drivers which then do all the hard work for you.There is a small chapter on how to use low-level USB facilities for a custom device, but not enough to make it useful. I didn't want a book about how to read (e.g.) keyboard presses, I wanted a book about how to use the USB port, and talk to endpoints etc., preferably using low-level ioctl calls. This is not that book.

This is a great little book for someone trying to get their head around the practicalities of using USB at the device driver level. It's given me a good kick-start ... and has also veered me from the course that I was going along, onto a better one.I also have Jan Axelson's "USB Complete" which I'd say is good for newbies.

USB Embedded Hosts is the name of the book. Developers guide.USB, yes, it is mentioned, a lot of how to communicate with a devices. Embedded? Sorry a Linux system is not embedded. That is a multi user desktop / server operating system; has nothing to do with embedded. Host? EHCI, OHCI is not even mentioned, so no word about host controller programming. Only a lot of high level Linux interface software interfacing with libraries that has absolutely no relevance to programming embedded host controllers. Very misleading title, waste of money. Should have read the reviews better before ordering.

I had expected the book to cover USB embedded hosts in general, but instead the book focusses on a very specific platform that I do not have/use, so the book is pretty much useless to me, and I couldn't know before I bought it