Forth Programming Classes
Open Firmware Training
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FORTH TEXTBOOKS
The following books and materials are included with our courses:
Forth Application Techniques
Embedded Systems Programming
- course notebook
Open Firmware
- course notebook
- Forth Programmer's Handbook
- Writing FCode Drivers for PCI
The purpose of this course is to take you through the first steps toward mastery of this powerful technology. The course is designed for engineers and developers with no prior experience with Forth or Open Firmware, and provides essential basics for further instruction in writing Open Firmware FCode drivers.
Much of Open Firmware's power and flexibility derives from the fact that it is implemented using Forth. Because Forth is naturally interactive and extensible, once you've learned some of its basics it will be easy for you to use it for maintenance, driver development, testing new target hardware, and for other purposes.
COURSE TOPICS
- Forth Philosophy and Basic Operations
- Arithmetic and logical operations; use of stacks and postfix notation; structured programming (loops and conditionals); constants, variables, and other data structures; string handling.
- Application Techniques
- Vectored execution; arrays; custom data types; formatting numbers; sealed vocabularies.
- Development Techniques
- Design techniques; programming style; maximizing readability and maintainability; debugging tools and strategies.
- Introduction to Open Firmware
- Background and training objectives; system and FCode drivers; exploring the device tree; packages and inter-package communication; static and instance data; node properties; property encoding and decoding; debugging strategies.
