Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)
ISBN:9780596155513 read summary

This was just exactly what the title says it is. For getting started with the Arduino its a fine book if you are going in dry. After reading the book in my case though I had already found most if not all the material on various websites so it was redundant. If you have not done any research on the Arduino yourself and you want to get started quickly then this will be an excellent book for you. Would highly recommend this book.

This book is a quick read, you can read it in under an hour if you have some background with these kinds of tools. If you're new to programming, you will want to spend a lot more time playing with the examples in the book. The writing style will not intimidate newbies, but experienced folks will still find it engaging.

It's well worth the price, and is a better intro to the Arduino than floundering around the webpages. Several subtle points are touched on here that you might easily miss otherwise (e.g., there's a similar language to the one on the Arduino that runs on your PC, it's called "Processing"). The book gracefully progresses from simple apps to more complex ones, ending with one that communicated with a proxy server (written in "Processing") that runs on the PC and shares data with the Arduino via USB.

If you're new to the Arduino, check out this little book. It's a real charmer.

The information in it is helpful, but it could have contained even more information. It gets you started, but won't take you all the way. Useful for begginners.

if you know nothing about programming and electronics, this is an excellent starter with hands-on examples.
personally, i wish it would go bit more in-depth about electronics : calculating a circuit resistance and other things like that. This would've helped the reader to build on more complicated circuits...but I guess the book would've ended up being 3 times as thick :-)

The book actually covers some really basic electronic theory, hardware and software. If you already know electronic theory and hardware, those sections will be of little use to you, as they assume the reader knows absolutely nothing. The software part is good, but I wish the same "start from zero" approach was consistent throughout the software part as well. Specifically the "processing language" part is not well done, and actually unnecessary if you just want to write code and get a board working. As my review title says it is worth the money, makes a convenient reference book, and if it saves you as little as an hour it is worth having. I am so impressed with the total Arduino development system and boards that I feel reluctant to be critical of anything by the author.