Real-World Interfacing with Your PC, 2E

Rating:
Summary: Don't waist your time
Review: I purchased this book to suppliment a class I teach in Microprocessors. I found some good information, however most of the material is going to be over most peoples heads. It has a large section on building a interface device that you will never use and spends very little time talking about the information most people are buying this book for. It does come with a software disk that makes testing you cable easy, and it does give you information that will help you out, but I would recommend getting the info off the web, and not purchasing this book.It is also very short for the money you will pay.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waist your time
Review: This book describes how to use your PC's parallel printer port (LPT1:) to interface with embedded systems hardware such as sensors and control circuits. The author starts by showing how to control input and output, and moves on to building and interfacing an 8-channel temperature measurement device (a muxed ADC setup based around the LM335 sensor). The software approach is developed with QBasic or GW-Basic, and includes example code on a floppy which can control and interpret data from any parallel port. With the prevalence of Visual Basic and Win95/WinNT (which DON'T allow direct control of the printer port), the author's approach is a bit dated, but for a beginner, it should suffice. Anyone who wants to learn the basics cheaply and easily would enjoy this book. The book is definitely a good place to start, and more sophisticated readers could then move on to Axelson's "Parallel Port Complete..." book, among others.

Rating:
Summary: A good resource for novice embedded systems projects.
Review: This book describes how to use your PC's parallel printer port (LPT1:) to interface with embedded systems hardware such as sensors and control circuits. The author starts by showing how to control input and output, and moves on to building and interfacing an 8-channel temperature measurement device (a muxed ADC setup based around the LM335 sensor). The software approach is developed with QBasic or GW-Basic, and includes example code on a floppy which can control and interpret data from any parallel port. With the prevalence of Visual Basic and Win95/WinNT (which DON'T allow direct control of the printer port), the author's approach is a bit dated, but for a beginner, it should suffice. Anyone who wants to learn the basics cheaply and easily would enjoy this book. The book is definitely a good place to start, and more sophisticated readers could then move on to Axelson's "Parallel Port Complete..." book, among others.

Rating:
Summary: marginally worth it
Review: This book had outlived its purpose by page 10. At that time you will have already learned what you need to know: The pinout of the LPT1 Port,which pins are inputs and which are outputs, the ports address (888 Decimal), and some mild detail on how to read/write to the port. After that point you will be ready to go, and the rest is really pointless if you know how to program, and you know your harware. If you cant find those things out anywhere else, then buy it (it got me building hardware and writing code)but I suggest looking online first. If you can find this book in a store, just browsing through the first few pages for 5 minutes or so will have you going home and making things work cost free. (this is meant to apply to students)