system architecture

Great book! This is the third book I've purchased on PCMCIA, and the first book that's actually been helpful. It has a good overview of hardware, programming the CIS, and the PC software interface. You may however want to complement this book with a copy of the PC Card standard and maybe Kipisz's Software Developers Handbook (although I find the latter lacking). Anderson gives several example designs that help demonstrate the various nuances of the different PC Card capabilities such as SRAM, Flash, serial communications, and multifunction I/O. Buy this book first!

Mindshare does bus protocols and the like really well. Unfortunately, the pccard stuff heavily depends on the Card Information Structure, special storage on the card where configuration info is held. Rather than explaining all the CIS fields, the book refers to the standard itself - this means that one cannot use the book to analyze CIS data. The book is OK to understand the general pccard concept, but insufficient to read/hack code to control pccard hardware.

This book is really nicely presented, the chapter headings are promising. Shame about the content. I don't think this book was ever edited, many of the tables and figures don't match the text. Exactly the same diagram turns up in almost every chapter, each time with a different title. Much of the information refers to 2.1 or 2.x (sometimes 1.1 in passsing) versions of the PCMCIA standard without being clear as to what the differences are or what is being refered to. Much of the information is repeated at seemingly random intervals, the chapters are very structured but the content doesn't match the structure. It is as if the whole book was the result of a giant cut-and-paste exercise without ever being read though afterwards. If Mindshares courses are like this book then I would imagine they have a lot of confused students. I won't buy any more books in the series based on my experience of this book even though the content should be what is needed.