Software Engineers Handbook:Fields:Embedded

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Just about everything these days has a computer of some sorts in it. Your VCR, your car and even your washing machine may have a microcontroller or microcomputer in it to control it. These computer based systems are often referred to as Embedded Systems, because they have a computer embedded within something. Programming embedded systems requires a different set of skills from standard PC programming, because you need to know a bit about the hardware (electronics) that your program is running on and you often have to be very aware of what resources (such as memory, speed etc.) your program can use.