If you want to prototype a circuit incorporating a micro-controller and firmware then the easiest way to get started is with an Arduino card. This book is an excellent introduction, showing you how to connect devices and write C programs. 250 pages.

Propeller is a chip with 8 32 bit CPU’s, and Spin is a language provided by the chip manufacturer. This book is about designing electronic embedded systems around the chip, and coding the software to run on it.  Example code controls stepper and DC motors. You can’t compare this all with IBM’s Cell processor, it is in a completely different universe. 350 pages.

All programmers will want to read this. 300 pages.

1 – Want to go Faster? Raise Your Hands if You Want to go Faster!
2 – Concurrent or not Concurrent?
3 – Proving Correctness and Measuring Performance
4 – Eight Simple Rules for Designing Multithreaded Applications
5 – Threading Libraries
6 – Parallel Sum and Prefix Scan
7 – Mapreduce
8 – Sorting
9 – Searching
10 – Graph Algorithms
11 – Threading Tools

This book is more about architecture than coding. It looks to be practical and really useful. Legendary ORA quality. 400 pages.

This will be useful if you are developing apps for mobile or embedded using Windows CE. 400 pages.

Concurrent programming has become important for a greater proportion of all programmers since commodity PC’s went multicore. Good books on this have been in OPL for years (click on the 5-star tag to see some of them).  This book is useful because it gathers all the important topics into one place.  It starts with a good introduction, then outlines machine architecture for Intel, AMD, Sparc and Cell. Then it gets into programming structure for thread synchronization, with code examples in C++.  It has good reference information on Posix threads (pthreads).  It is intended for C++ programmers, but Java programmers will gain from reading it too. It is not the most readable book in the library.

Here is a good practical introduction to designing appliances (DVRs, routers, any intelligent device) using Linux and open source tools. It discusses architecture then practical details with example code. The book is very readable, and the authors clearly have real experience.