Not so with Programming with STM32 Nucleo Boards, where the software examples can be downloaded easily by first finding the book’s support and information page: www.elektor.com/programming-with-stm32-nucleo-boards and then locating “download software” (meaning: Software download?) which although printed in bold and red still isn’t too obvious an active hyperlink!



Clicking on it downloads a huge (283-MB) file called ‘Programs STM32 Nucleo Book.zip’. Unzipped, the file has all the demo programs neatly arranged in folders named after the “project” carried out and described in the book.



You may be happy at this point to have “all the ^@#&* files” on your computer, but knowing how to use them in in STMicro’s System Workbench environment is another thing. Fortunately, in Appendix A of the book, the author provides a concise, perfectly structured tutorial in Nucleo file unpacking, organizing, viewing, if necessary editing, compiling, and uploading to the Nucleo processor, which should enable you to launch the projects in a jiffy. None of this happens in a “cloud” environment as is so trendy these days.

Conclusion

This is a book worth having, as it perfectly complements and in some ways beats, STMicroelectronics’ official documentation on their Nucleo L476RG dev board and the wide range of Nucleo extension boards.

As minor criticisms of the book, the author does not explain too well — or is overmodest about — his choice of the Nucleo-L476RG Development Board as the board on which all experiments in the book are based. Although his choice leaves little to desire especially for students and newcomers to ARM programming, a little more on the trade-offs between cost, power, memory size and ease of use compared to, a cheap Nucleo-144 board or the beefiest of Nucleo-32 boards would have enriched the first chapter. I also found the book slightly lacking in personal tone and ways of expressing the relative difficulty or fun factor of the projects, as well as the problems and bugs encountered during their development (which surely must have occurred).

On the book proper, I cannot fathom why the figure captions in the book have square brackets around them, why the chapter titles are so small, nor the ugly habit of starting chapters on left-hand pages. Also, a cry should go out to the publishers to print books like this in colour to do justice to the complex screendumps and program listings.

On special promotion the book comes with a free Nucleo L476RG dev board for just €34.95. It’s a pity the bundle does not include two or three low-end Nucleo expansion boards to get you started but then you have one extra reason to rail away to electronica Munich in November this year.
 

Programming with STM32 Nucleo Boards
By Dogan Ibrahim
288 pages, soft bound
Price: €34.95
ISBN 978-1-907920-68-4
www.elektor.com/programming-with-stm32-nucleo-boards
Contents Preview and Book & Nucleo L476RG Bundle offer available through above link