原创 Free e-book: MicroZed Chronicles by Adam Taylor

I'm constantly amazed how time manifests its "wibbly-wobbly" nature, as Doctor Who would say. For example, I feel as though I've known Adam Taylor for decades -- in reality, however, we first came into contact just a couple of years ago... (Cue fuzzy visual effect along with a "going back in time" snippet of music).

This all came about shortly after I'd assumed the mantle of "Editor in Chief" at the All Programmable Planet website. Mike Santarini, the editor of Xcell Journal, contacted me to say that a UK engineer called Adam Taylor had written a very interesting article on designing mission-critical state machines, and would I be interested in re-purposing it anywhere.

I took a look at the article in Xcell Journal, and it was really good, so I reached out to Adam to ask him if he would care to become a blogger on All Programmable Planet. While we were chatting, we discovered that we had both attended Sheffield Hallam University in England, and we'd even shared some of the same lecturers, although Adam came through 20 years after yours truly. Furthermore, both Adam and I hail from the county of Yorkshire, which is blessed by both Monty Python and the gods.

Even though it's only been a couple of years, Adam and I have become firm friends. Adam ended up writing many blogs for All Programmable Planet before the site transmogrified over to Programmable Logic Designline. Adam also helped me with some information on safety-critical systems for a course on Industrial Control I was working on. We finally met in person at Design West 2013, where I was one of the track chairs and we were both presenting papers. We met again at EELive! 2014, at which time Adam was one of the track chairs and, once again, we were both presenting papers.

Recently, I was delighted to hear that Adam has been asked to give the keynote presentation at the FPGA Forum 2015 in Norway (in fact, I snagged the following pic of Adam from their bios page).

Today, Adam is head of engineering systems within High Performance Imaging Solutions division of e2v, where -- as he says -- he gets to work on "really cool space and astronomy stuff." In fact, Adam's group is working on a replacement for the Hubble Telescope and on creating the first color 3D survey of the universe.

But that's not what I wanted to tell you about (LOL).

For the past year Adam has been writing a column on the Zynq System on Chip for the Xilinx Xcell blog. It seems that this week represents the first year's anniversary of this endeavor. To celebrate, Adam has compiled all of these articles into this free e-book, which teaches you all about working with the Zynq, all the way from the "Hello World" basics to asymmetric multiprocessing and the addition of several real-time operating systems (RTOSs).

Well, you can call me "old-fashioned" if you will, but I always feel that a free e-book that is written by an expert is nothing to be sniffed at (I've already downloaded my copy).