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Rating: 
Summary: Completed Reference
Review: I am fairly new to the PIC world. While trying to pic (pun intended)out a suitable MCU book I came across this particular book. This is a great reference book for both advanced and begginers. I also purchased PROGRAMMING AND CUSTOMIZING PICmicro MICROCONTROLLERS by Myke predko. The combination of these book had me writting softwre and building complex circuitry in no time. I was able to build a small robot which uses the following:
Pulse width modulation, Seven Segment Display control, Playback/Recording, push buttons, servo contol, DC motor control.
These are both great books I reccomend them highly.
Rating:
Summary: Thorough and knowledgeable treatment of PICs
Review: This is a very thorough treatment of PICs. There are so many great aspects to this book it is hard to know where to begin. The book starts at the beginning, talking about logic circuits and essential micro theory, such as address decoding and so on. The PIC architecture and instruction set is covered in detail and the many well crafted diagrams are used to convey the relevant information.I particularly enjoyed the later chapters on interfacing, parallel, serial and A/D. A whole chapter on using timers is also very welcome. These chapters offered real practical advice and examples. In fact there are many examples throughout the book and all have been tried and tested. It goes without saying that programming the PIC (instruction set, bank addressing, assembly code, timing, modules and subroutines and so on...) is well covered and a whole chapter is devoted to interrupt handling. This book is dense with a lot of great info packed beautifully into about 500 pages. There is an accompanying website which has extensive resources such as instruction sets that can be downloaded and printed out. There is also an comprehensive errata section and solutions to self assessment questions that appear at the end of nearly all the chapters. I really like this as most books are very quick to ask questions but rarely do they give the answers. Since most of us are not monks we don't want to spend the rest of our lives thinking of what an answer might be. Much better to understand the problem and be guided to the answer when we are in a hurry. MPLAB, available free from Microcontroller's website (or indeed the authors) is used throughout so you don't need to worry about [the] software. Make no mistake, this is not a hobbyists cookbook. This is a serious treatment of a serious subject. Professionals should note that in addition to a chapter devoted to assembly programming there is also a chapter on using a high level language (C in this case). Of course there are many, many code examples throughout the text. I really like this book, at the price I think it is a real bargain. Especially when you compare this with the many hobby PIC books which only offer a cursory treatment of PICs and tend to concentrate on 8-bit versions. This book also covers the 14 and 16 bit cores. A great discovery!
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