ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers in Practice: Startup Code, Interrupts, and Hardware Control

A hands-on guide to programming ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers at the register level no HAL, no CMSIS abstractions, no hand-holding. Starting from the moment power hits the chip, this book walks you through every layer of bare-metal embedded firmware: startup code and reset sequences, linker scripts, GPIO control, interrupts, timers, DMA, serial protocols, clock trees, low-power modes, and fault diagnosis.

Each chapter builds on the last, with real register writes, working code examples, and mini projects you can run on any STM32 Nucleo board. By the final chapter you will have built a complete interrupt-driven, DMA-accelerated, low-power control system from scratch without a single HAL function call.

Ideal for engineers moving from 8-bit microcontrollers to ARM, developers who want to understand what their HAL is actually doing, and anyone who needs to write production-quality embedded firmware that is fast, small, and fully predictable.