5 Embedded Software Engineering Books Every Developer Should Read5 Embedded Software Engineering Books Every Developer Should Read
While you can browse the Internet hoping to find what you are looking for, good old-fashioned books are still great resources to grow your skillset. Check these five out!
January 18, 2025

At a Glance
- Study up on software architecture, test-driven development, automating DevOps, and more.
- With more than 60% of embedded systems still written in C, you need to know more than just the basics.
- And be sure to read, Embedded Software Design: A Practical Approach to Architecture, Processes, and Coding Techniques.
If there is one thing in software engineering that is a given, it’s that engineers need continuous education. While graduating college might have made us think that we were “done,” the truth is that technology advances too fast to sit back and “do our jobs.” While there are many ways to educate yourself, in this post we will explore five software engineering books that I think should be on every software engineer’s and every embedded software engineer’s reading list.
Clean Architecture: A Craftman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design by Robert C. Martin
Clean Architecture is one of my favorite software architecture books. Robert Martin, often referred to as “Uncle Bob,” clearly walks developers through a practical framework for creating scalable and maintainable software systems.
The book introduces concepts that are often foreign to many embedded systems and software developers, such as use cases, entities, and data flow as core elements that guide system structure. Martin stresses that software architecture should be developed by focusing on the core business rules of the software. (A viewpoint that I highly advocate).
Drawing on his famous SOLID principles, Martin illustrates how to design software that can accommodate change without accruing excessive technical debt. By carefully partitioning responsibilities and establishing strict boundaries, teams can more easily adapt to new requirements, add features, or switch databases and front-end technologies.
While not strictly written for embedded systems developers, the concepts in this book if followed carefully can result in more scalable and flexible software systems.
Test-Driven Development for Embedded C by James W. Grenning
TDD for Embedded C is a book that revolutionized how I develop embedded software. Before this book, I had a mentality of writing hundreds or thousands of lines of code and then testing it all at once. While the process seemed to work, it was inefficient, slowed down development, and resulted in code that was tightly coupled to the hardware.
In this book, James Grenning walks developers through how to flip their mindset to thinking about tests first. When tests come first, you never waste time writing code you don’t need because if there isn’t a test, you don’t write the production code! In fact, you also don’t waste time debugging software either! The mantra of TDD is that you use the TDD microcycle, which states you develop software in these steps:
Add a small test
Run all the tests and see the new one fail, maybe not even compile
Make the small changes needed to pass the test
Run all the tests and see the new one pass
Refactor to remove duplication and improve expressiveness
By focusing on testing first, testing drives development. The code you write has the tests to make sure that it does what it was supposed to! When you add new code and something breaks, you know about it immediately! It’s far easier to debug code you just wrote than code you haven’t looked at in weeks.
TDD for Embedded C does a great job teaching TDD principles and creating unit tests to test your software. While you might say you don’t want to use TDD, this book is still perfect if you want to learn how to create unit tests and write more reliable software. I will warn you that if you aren’t used to TDD, this book will change your mindset. Once you understand and realize the power of Grenning's concepts in this book, you’ll never go back to writing firmware like before.
Embedded Software Design: A Practical Approach to Architecture, Processes, and Coding Techniques by Jacob Beningo
Obviously, I’m a bit biased about this book, being that I am the author, but hear me out for a minute. Embedded Software Design, at its core, is about helping embedded software developers successfully deliver products on time and within budget by adopting modern software engineering methodologies.
Embedded Software Design looks at the successful delivery of an embedded system hinging on balancing what is called the Embedded Software Triad:
Software Architecture Design
Agile, DevOps, and Processes
Tools, Development, and Coding Skills
The idea is that most teams that have challenged deliveries are only focusing on two of the three areas, as shown in the image below:
You can see that the issue(s) the team encounters show where the focus is. For example, if your development cycle has issues like being late, inconsistent, and quality issues, then you are probably focusing on the architecture and development and neglecting your processes.
The book helps the readers identify what is getting in their way of delivering successfully while also diving into each of these three areas and helping them to adopt modern practices. For example, in the software architecture section, readers learn different design patterns and decomposition techniques to create a flexible and scalable architecture. In the Agile, DevOps, and Processes section, they learn how to design a CI/CD pipeline, write unit tests, and improve the quality of embedded software. Finally, the Tools and Skills section focuses on code patterns, writing configurable software, and modern tools.
Automating DevOps with Gitlab CI/CD Pipelines by Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, and Chris Timberlake
Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines is a highly practical guide for teams looking to streamline their development processes using GitLab’s robust DevOps capabilities. While tools like Jenkins and GitHub offer CI/CD functionality, this book focuses on showing you how to leverage GitLab’s tightly integrated platform to drive efficiency and collaboration across your organization.
Throughout the chapters, the authors strike a balance between explaining foundational DevOps concepts and walking you through real-world examples of configuring pipelines. You’ll learn how to automate tasks such as code compilation, testing, deployment, and more, all within a single, cohesive ecosystem. By illustrating step-by-step setup procedures and best practices, the book helps you avoid common pitfalls, whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine an existing setup.
A key strength is the emphasis on embedding DevOps principles into your team culture. Even if you’ve been working with GitLab and continuous integration for years, there’s still plenty of insightful advice on topics like pipeline optimization, security, and scaling. Embedded systems teams, especially, will appreciate guidance on using GitLab for hardware-software integration and continuous testing.
Overall, Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines helps you build a sustainable and repeatable delivery workflow. By the end, you’ll walk away with a solid blueprint for managing your projects more efficiently, ensuring reliable releases, and fostering a DevOps mindset across your organization.
Expert C Programming: Deep Secrets by Peter van der Linden
Over 60% of embedded systems are still written in the C language. While many might prefer that the industry move to C++ or Rust, there seems to be no escaping C. So, if you can’t get away from C, then you need to make sure that you have an expert understanding of it, and no book does a better job than Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden.
While this particular book is older, its material is still just as relevant today as it was first published in 1994. While C has evolved since then, the book's core is still important. It teaches you how to descramble declarations, manage memory, make heads and tails of linking, and much more. Not to mention that the book does a fantastic job of clearing up confusion that is often encountered between arrays and pointers.
If you learned C on the fly, then adding this book to your reading list for this year is a wise choice to shore up any expert language features that you may have missed.
Taking your next steps
Continuous education is necessary for software engineers, especially embedded software engineers who must balance modern software practices with an ever-changing hardware landscape. While you can certainly browse the Internet hoping to find what you are looking for, good old-fashioned books are still great resources to grow your skillset.
While hundreds of software engineering books available today are likely all great reads and can teach you a lot, these five are the ones I’ve seen have the biggest impact on how developers design and build embedded systems. They might just help you also transform your development practices in the year ahead.
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