The abstract was about creating a vision system for a pick-and-place machine. In short, holding an SMT part over a camera and then analyzing the image to determine the part offset (X,Y,&T) so that it can be placed accurately on the pads. These systems exist but generally they are crazy expensive.
The package included the board, a couple of USB cables, and the book. There's no CD, just directions to download the software off the net. Apparently I also was granted a license for the Micrium RTOS (they make it sound like not everyone will get that). The book, hard covered and 865 page long, covers the Micrium uC/OS-III Real-Time Kernel.
I gotta say, this stuff makes the Arduino, MSP-460, and NXP mbed look like toys.