Dennis Jackson spoke with us about making the career shift from software to embedded.

Dennis buys James Grenning’s Test Driven Development in Embedded C for his new hires and often recommends Elecia’s Making Embedded Systems. His tip that everyone should know was “Learn make!” and he has a reference for that: Why Use Make.

He suggested Joel Spolsky’s reading lists from Joel On Software, even the ones that don’t obviously apply.

Additional suggested-reading articles:

• 30 Pitfalls for Real Time Systems (part 1 and part 2)
• Rules for defensive C programming
• Why are you still using C
• What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic
• The Power of Ten -- 10 Rules for Writing  Safety Critical Code .

In his previous appearance on Embedded (#25: Don’t Be Clever), we talked about code complexity and measuring cyclomatic complexity. At that time he wanted a tool to monitor the code’s status. He has since found one: pmccabe.

Dennis currently works at Element Science.