RP2040 Assembly Language Programming: ARM Cortex-M0+ on the Raspberry Pi Pico

I think this book is a bit short for its price. Talking about programming RP2040 in Assembly language should take at least 500+ pages. However, it's a good introduction to this topic.

Assembly language is hard to learn so it helps to have a good teacher. This book does an excellent job of teaching assembly for those students who are willing to work. There are lots of concepts you will not get unless you go go over it a few times and write the code yourself. This book has everything I needed to be competent in RP2040 (ARM) assembly but you do need to have the mental endurance to keep trying when things don't work on the first attempt. This book is very well written and was a joy for me use.

I have other assembly language textbooks by Brue Smith including RPi 32 bit and Intel X86. His track record with this type of text is good.However, I am very disappointed in this text. In the first chapter he mostly defers to the Raspberry Pi Foundation text RP2040 Getting Started. Which is OK since he doesn't need to duplicate that material.When he dives into the "Hello World" program in Chapter 2 it is a pain in the neck to get it to compile using the pico-sdk. It is very cumbersome and takes a very long time generating numerous folders and files in the build directory. Chasing down the cmake file errors is terrible.It is vastly more difficult to build assembly projects with the pico than other micro controllers that I have worked with, particularly those from Microchip, Pyboard, Arduino, etc.It is a shame that the sample version of this text for Kindle only contains the cursory info in Chapter 1. To get to the real content, you have to buy the book. For me, it was a waste of money and time.YMMV

This is a great resource to writing Assembly code directly to RP2040 boards. It is easy to follow for the most part; the only thing that has me stuck on was the openocd/gdb setup portion at the start, which was a hassle to get working. I don't have a raspberry pi with pin headers so the only way I learned I could debug cheaply was use a second raspberry pico as a picoprobe tool. Which could have helped save some time.After everything was set up, I was able to start programming in assembly with no issue. It has given me the confidence to control the arm cortex m0+ microprocessor embedded in the chip, and given insight on low level programming.I am still in the midsts of going through all the material, but because it has simple instructions I can follow along with the examples.I normally don't buy books with high prices but I think this is worth it if you want understanding of the full potential of the RP2040 microcontroller (and ARM assembly).One suggestion for readers I would like to impart is you when debugging with gdb with small amounts of code, you can use -DPICO_NO_FLASH=1 option during cmake so that code is loaded directly to memory, saving the writes on the external flash of the RP2040 chip.

The content is really good, but if I had realised that for £30 I was getting the cheap poor quality ‘printed by Amazon’ entity that pretends to be a book I would just have got the Kindle version.Seriously a flimsy cover and warped paper is not worth £30.Please Amazon either learn how to print a worthy physical book or stop ripping off customers by claiming to sell a real book only to find out it is an Amazon ‘flimsy’. A real publisher knows how to make a book to be proud of.

Bon livre

It may suit someone new to assembly language. Probably about 150 pages of content spread over 320 pages. And not impressed with the Amazon print quality. These books always seem to arrive with the pages following the profile of a sine wave.