Burt Janz has been involved with computing systems since he assembled his first microcomputer in the US Navy in 1975. Starting with the development of device drivers and low-level interfaces on *nix systems in the early 1980s, Mr. Janz has been writing complex software products for over 30 years. His expertise stretches from the design and implementation of low-level operating system internals and device drivers to complex applications for embedded and handheld devices and government and enterprise-level systems.

A 1988 graduate with high honors in BSCS from Franklin Pierce College, he was an adjunct professor at Daniel Webster College for 11 years in their evening-based Continuing Education program, developing embedded and enterprise-level software during the day. His curricula of instruction included courses from a basic introduction to computers to programming languages (C/C++/Java) to networking theory and network programming, database theory and schema design, artificial intelligence systems. Along the way, Mr. Janz has written magazine articles and other technical commentaries as well as having been involved with one of the first over-the-counter Linux distributions (Yggdrasil, in 1994).

Mr. Janz has designed complete embedded and enterprise-level software system architectures as a lead architect and has led teams from the requirements and design phases of new products through to completion and delivery to customers. He has experience with x86, 68xxx, PPC, ARM, and SPARC processors and continues to write kernel threads and kmods, open firmware device trees, drivers for new and proprietary hardware, FPGA I/P core interfaces, applications, libraries, and boot manager code. He may be contacted directly by email at [email protected] or [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

Dave (Jing) Tian is a PhD student and a security researcher at the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) department of the University of Florida. He is a founding member of the SENSEI center and the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity. His research involves system security, embedded systems, trusted computing, and compilers. He has an interest in Linux kernel hacking, compiler hacking, and machine learning. He also spent a year on AI and machine learning direction and taught Python and operating system classes at the University of Oregon. Before that, he worked as a software developer at the Linux Control Platform (LCP) group at Alcatel-Lucent (former Lucent Technologies) R&D department for around 4 years. He holds BS and ME degrees in EE from China. He can be reached via his blog (http://davejingtian.org) and e-mail ([email protected]).

Thanks to the authors, who have done a good job, and the editors, who made this book perfect and offered me the opportunity to review such a nice book.

Helmi ROMDHANI is an embedded HW/SW engineer. He graduated from the national engineering school of Sousse, Tunisia. His primary job is at Tunisian Embedded Systems, which specializes in the research, development, prototyping, and installation of  embedded systems. He specializes in embedded telecommunication field, especially in developing embedded software for residential gateways. He frequently works with embedded platforms (Raspberry Pi and Arduino), Linux, shell, Yocto, Python, C# (.Net), Android, databases (MySQL), web services, and Proteus Isis (PCB design).

Any contact is welcome at [email protected].

I would like to thank all my family for their support, encouragement, and love, especially my mother, Salha, and my father, Mokhtar.

Pierre FICHEUX is currently the CTO at Open Wide Ingénierie, a software service company specializing in open source technologies.

Pierre is also a teacher and manager of the GISTRE (Génie Informatique des Systèmes Temps Réel et Embarqués) specialty at EPITA, a famous French school of computer science.

He’s also an author of four editions of Linux Embarqué, Eyrolles , a French reference book about building embedded Linux systems.