Tutorial book selection

I want to support the further development of FreeRTOS as I am using it since a while, not extensibly but however. Up to now I had to maintain existing projects not written by me using Atmels’ mega and xmega architectures. Now I am starting new projects based on different controllers (Renesas RX, Cortex M4 and TI C2000) and I want to have a deeper insight into the internas. So first, I want to buy the full set of manuals and this leads me to the first question which might be from interrest for every potential manual buyer: What is the difference between the tutorial book – standard base edition and  edition. Is the specific edition having more contents, the base edition plus some specific information? Which one should I select? I think it doesn’t make sense to select three tutorials, standard, Cortex-M3 and RX600. Comparing the table of contents does not clearly answer this question. Thanks in advance! Bernhard

Tutorial book selection

First note the books are (as described on the web) “step by step hands on guides to using…”, so they cover writing multi tasking applications from the basics to an intermediate level, they don’t cover the internal design of FreeRTOS.  I like to think the internal design becomes clear when you step through the code, if not actually just looking at it.  There is also a separate (third party) book about the design of open source software that includes a chapter on the internals of FreeRTOS. Because the concepts of using the kernel are the same on each architecture the books have, as you would expect, a lot of commonality.  There are certain sections that are hardware relevant though, and those are the sections that differ.  One obvious example is the chapter on using interrupts as different FreeRTOS ports have different interrupt nesting models, and run on hardware that has different interrupt levels and models, etc. The standard edition is the shortest, and does not have anything hardware specific.  It talks in generic terms. The RX, LPC and generic Cortex books have architecture specific information on interrupt management, a few other things like obtaining the tools, and where the code is in the distribution. The LPC and generic Cortex books also have a chapter on FreeRTOS-MPU. Hope that helps. Regards.

Tutorial book selection

Thanks for the informations. If I understand it right, the specific editions are a superset of the standard edition and therefore contains all generic terms plus architecure specific ones. The conclusion would be that the Cortex-M3 edition would be the most comprehensive choice if someone is so far already aware of the architectural differences between the micros. Thanks again!