I don’t know about you, but I am, at least at the time of writing, a so-called firmware engineer who knows a little bit of C/C++/Python/Rust, who struggles with keeping some vague and superficial, out-of-date and sometimes incorrect understanding about the hardware platform that runs my code.

Whenever I talked to the hardware folks, words, especially acronyms, from their mouths appear to be so fancy and yet esoteric that so many times I left the conversation with glassy eyes and blank mind.

And then for several times I decided to invest my time into learning the hardware side of the embedded world, yet every time my ambitions became frustrations when all my search results point to lengthy and tedious protocol specifications or user manuals. The hardware engineers seem to live in another parallel universe where we as the programmers can never reach.

Life should not be like that. This is the 21st century and one can buy a yellowish little book of XXX for Dummies for basically everything. When you can get a book called Casino Gambling For Dummies, I seriously think we should have a Dummies book for those magical hardware technologies, like AMBA. In the end, for people like us so smart that can actually debug the very code we wrote a year ago, learning some hardware stuff is not that difficult, right?

Right?

This series, hopefully can become a little Dummies book later, intents to build a bridge from the universe that dummies and us live in, to the higher-dimensional space where the hardware designers keep their secrets. Once you know enough to not be a dummy, you should proudly throw this little book far away and start tasting the goodies of the specs from ARM.