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Summary: (Almost) Everything you want to know about the PIC
Review: The use of Microchip's PIC family of microcontrollers is growing rapidly worldwide. This tutorial/disk package is unique in providing you with a thorough understanding of the PIC chip and how to develop applications for it. 30 experiments, 12 sample applications and the Microchip tools necessary to program the devices are included with the book on 3.5" diskette.
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Summary: A Must Have Book!
Review: A complete easy to read and very informative book. The Pic family is covered very well. You will appreciate the easy to read format, plenty of examples, and many related projects. This was my first book purchased on the Pic and remains my favorite.This book is for starters as well as the more experienced people that deal with microcontrollers.
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Summary: A disorganized mishmosh; a waste of time and effort.
Review: After reading the earlier, excellent book in this series on Basic Stamps, I was hoping to find another book of similar quality to help me delve into the world of PICs. I am, to say the least, very disappointed. I'm a senior level software engineer with a good hardware background, but I found this book to be so unclear as to be nearly unreadable. There is little logical progression in building the reader's conceptualizations. Facts are introduced seemingly at random. Irrelevant ideas are gratuitously tossed in, only to be rescinded shortly after. I looked in vain for a chapter that lived up to its title, and felt disappointed with each and every one. There isn't even an appendix listing the processor's instruction set! There's no way I could program a PIC after reading this book, and I'm almost as ignorant about them as before. All in all, a very frustrating experience.
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Summary: Poor organization and writing
Review: After reading the mixed reviews, I bought this book anyway. Even the more negative reviews had not prepared me for the vague writing style and, much worse, the very real lack of structure. There is progression of ideas is weak and haphazard with insufficient explanation of basic concepts. It is possible to learn from this book, but only by reading the datasheets first, and then perhaps by reading the book cover to cover twice -- I had expected the book to serve as a self-contained introduction, allowing me to use the datasheet only as a reference, but I could not use it as such. Instead of this book, I recommend Peatman's book over this one (also sold by Amazon). It has everything this book lacks, and covers more ground, including features of the more advanced PIC controllers.
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Summary: Good mix of theory and experiments.
Review: Being a radio amateur I decided to build a processor controlled small band fm-receiver. I was faced to the problem to develop a LCD-Display and a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) oscillator which both need control of a microprocessor. Having no experience using these wonderful devices I decided to buy Mike's book to get the knowledge how to program a Microchip PIC processor and to understand what I am doing. Most of all I like the mix of theory and experiments in his book. After reading the theoretical part the experiments are providing "Aha"-effects even if only a LED flashes in a manner programmed to the PIC processor. The provided theory enables me to influence the manner and to understand what's going on. The software included is a real good starting point for my own application. For example the file LCD3LINE.INC made interfacing to the LCD-Diplay easy. Now I am starting to develop the I2C-bus controlled PLL and I am glad to find a software example on this bus in his book too. Thomas Martin, DF7TV.
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Summary: Excellent place to start learning the PIC microcontroller
Review: I am extremely impressed with the way this book leads you through the programming process. The way it incorporates projects into the learning process really makes it fun. The text is not dry at all which is rare in a book of this kind.
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Summary: Definatly NOT the book for beginners.
Review: I bought this book hoping to learn about PIC's and microcontrollers in general and was serverely dissapointed. After struggling with trying to understand it for way too long, I decided to return the book.
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Summary: Myke has produced another winner.
Review: I highly recommend this book for anyone planning to use, or currently experimenting with the PIC Microcontroller. Myke does an excellent job explaining the details of programming and using the PIC. I use this book for teaching my students microcontroller programming, industrial control systems and robotics. The included projects help readers gain a better understanding of the overall operation of the PIC microcontroller. Myke also presents some solid code examples to help readers build the included projects.
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Summary: Wish the book covered more topics.
Review: I saw no chapters on other programming languages like picc or picbasic. This is unfortunate seeing as the author seems to explain things very well. I would have enjoyed reading about these subjects from this author.
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Summary: NOT the first PIC book you should buy
Review: I was VERY disapointed by this book on my first few readings. There is NO clear layout, introduction, or progress of concepts as the book goes along. There are mistakes in places (that I known of). Only AFTER reading the detailed PIC specs from Microchip was I able to go back and read Mike's book. AFTER knowing the things Mike did not tell me, I was able to read his book and get much of value from among the pages. Summary: After you learn about PICs, Mike's book may well be worth the cover price.
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