Hi Nick and Dennis,

I see now that I could have been more helpful.

Forced to give it a "yea" or "nay" vote, I'd give it a "yea verily", especially if one does not want to invest as much in a library as I have. I take out of books what they give me. Since I have an extensive library, the more books I get, the less new ones give me. If I try to clear my mind of all the cluttered input from other books and isolate this one, I'd say that there is quite a bit contained in this one book -- lots of 8051 stuff, lots of applied 8051 stuff, lots of good foundation material with examples. It is sort of an "Embedded System Building Blocks", but expanded and specific to the 8051.

I think that someone like Nick that (paraphrasing) "knows these chips quite well" won't get as much out of the 8051 hardware foundations part of the book, but will get more value out of the projects or applications and how the 8051 was applied (usage patterns) and building up one's Bag-O-Tricks. The "time-triggered" aspect of the book is good too. It talks about different types of schedulers and task-oriented design. Don't worry, all that is not necessarily in the context of a formal RTOS kernel, the unqualified use of which stirs some ire here from time to time.

To put it another way, if I was to start all over again with a goal of minimizing the expense and size of a library I was trying to put together, this book would be one of the ones I would own.

Best regards,

--
Dan Henry