Programming Robot Controllers

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This book is well written with lots of practical projects. The included software is a real bonus and gets you programming PICs right away. Another excellent book by Predko!!

Rating:
Summary: Not relevent to robotics!!
Review: This guy should stick to writing about microcontrollers because there isn't much about robotics in this book!! For example: by the time you get to page 170 the project is how to flash an LED - dear god help me - I buy a book about robotics and he's got 170 pages of filler leading up to what? To flash an LED??? The C code is junior at best - obfuscated spaghetti code and his patronizing egotistical comments drive us crazy. And again, I just love all of the author written drivel reviews with 5 stars - predkos cramped writting style is recognizable anywhere. BTW by the time you get to page 358 he talks about neural nets and the only single line of code he has to offer as an example is this: Outputs = f(Inputs); you gotta be kidding me!!

Rating:
Summary: A depressing book
Review: When I first heared about the book, I was like whoa , it has everything I've been trying to learn.I had a background on programming PIC's using assembly ,so I liked the idea of learning C for PIC's and building a robot...But honestly,this book made me sick and frustrated from robotics because i wasted lot of money on this book and the other two books in this series (ROBOT DNA series)

Chapter 1"Microcontrollers in Robotics" : This chapter is the worst.It has random information that's useless for both beginners and experts like block diagrams from pic16f84 datasheet and long paragraphs on types and shapes of batteries.

Chapter 2 "Software Development" : When I started to read the book,I was like chapter 1 is bad because it might be just an introduction or something ...but guess what, the whole book is like chapter 1!!! random information on everything,the author attempts to discuss the following topics in this chapter:
source files,object files,libraries,linkers,hex files,assemblers,compilers,interpreters,simulators and emulators!!(ie. topics that you would need tons of books to understand them)

Chapter 3 The Microchip PICmicro Microcontroller: This chapter is nothing but copy/paste of pic's datasheets plus more random information about different topics ...oh yeah and a circuit of a programmer that you can get from the internet for free.

Chapter 4 : this chapter has some circuits and code that you can easily find in google, like how to interface the pic with LCD using two wires..etc ...
Chapter 5 and 6 : more long and useless articles on hard topics.

I think that Myke was trying to include everything he knows about in this book...so we ended up with a book that's impossible to understand by hobbyists and beginners,and useless for experts and engineers..for example, if i want to learn about interpreters,compilers ,batteries, i wouldn't buy a robotics or a PICmicro book!