PIC Microcontrollers: Know It All (Newnes Know It All),   ISBN:9780750686150

Customer Rating: 

On the outside this looks like dozens of other engineering selection guides for various electronic parts. What sets it apart and makes it a little easier to review is that it takes a kind of a textbook approach to the subject. It contains program examples, the basics of each device, and some usage examples.

I would highly recommend this to someone with a little bit of technical background, and whose goal is to develop a smart product or device. It would not only aid in the selection of which programable processor to choose, but you may even find examples on how to implement solutions that would save valuable development time. I think this book had a number of potential users, not only the engineer, but the dabbler, the student, the inventor, or the teacher.

There is enough information in the technical data to make decisions in case a chip choice might include some future expansion. All in all a good little book to have on the electronics shelf. A CD is included with source code and a student evaluation edition of a compiler, various functions will cease to work after 60 days so, if you are gonna work seriously with the processors you'll eventually have to buy a compiler, but at least you can try out some test projects. You will typically need some hardware to flash these with too, so the book doesn't get you everything, it just provides the basic knowledge.

Customer Rating: 

PIC Microcontrollers, Know it All is exactly what the cover describes it as; the ultimate hard-working desk reference. I bought this book with the hopes that it would help me learn the language necessary to write successful programs for the Microchip® PIC Microcontroller; and it did just that, help. It is not an all-inclusive study guide or teaching aide.
The text provides knowledge necessary to build a base knowledge of the inner workings of microcontrollers, and explores some various languages available to help you begin writing programs. It will help you understand how information moves within the microcontrollers, explores memory and architecture types, introduces you to the microcontroller instruction set, and more. With this text, and supplemental information from the internet, I was successful in learning assembly language programming, having had no previous knowledge or experience in about a month's time.
I would like to point out, that I felt this book's layout was a bit unorganized. There were sections and chapters that felt out of place, and sometimes left me confused. As an example, the book begins explaining how to accomplish tasks using certain lines of instructions prior to introducing you to any instructions at all, let alone the instructions the text references. I found myself constantly flipping around the book, sometimes hundreds of pages at a time, to find information I needed to read a chapter in the beginning of the book.
Despite the book's minor flaws, it still proved to be an invaluable resource, and it will find a permanent home on my book shelf at the side of my desk. Again, as the book's cover says, it is undoubtedly the ultimate hard-working desk reference, and a worth-while investment.

Customer Rating: 

Although seemingly a contradiction, this book servers both functions remarkably well. It's not for the rank beginner as some basic hardware and software knowledge is assumed, but, if you have that, it'll teach you what you need to know to get PIC based projects running.

...to be continued...good night!... :)

Customer Rating: 

Microcontrollers is one of those subjects that so heavily depends on other inter-related subjects it can be very hard to get started, particularly if you aren't a relatively competent in some programming language. As the title of my review states I am still relatively new to this field. In fact when starting out I had to choose between a PIC and AVR development board. Both are well regarded, popular, and supposedly easy to get started with. I chose, somewhat arbitrarily, the AVR. After all, until you actually get down and work with these all the various pro's and con's are somewhat abstract. While I am not unhappy with my AVR experience, PIC is as I said, a very popular platform and I am keen to learn about it. In short, for the purposes of this review my background is as follows:
1. new to micros
2. I've had one C++ course, though I am now learning C
3. been working with the AVR for a few months

I want to praise the authors' handling of Section I (the first 3 chapters). It's hard to write intro's and overviews that can take a reader from zero to their first step. And often this information isn't in one place. In this regard the book is very successful. A lot of reviewers refer to this as 'a good reference'. That may be true, but it's only a reference if you're already familiar with much of the information.The section on parallel ports cleared up some confusion I have had since day one.

Starting with section II I ran into a partial roadblock. Assembly. The book covers programming in Assembly, MBasic, and C in three separate sections. I have no opinion on the advantages/disadvantages in programming in assembly. For my purposes I just don't need it- I am not a professional embedded developer. I planned to skip the assembly and MBasic sections and just go through the part on C. Unfortunately, I found the book frequently referring back to the section on assembly when explaining something in C. If your already familiar with a lot of the concepts, this may not be relevant. However, even for me this wasn't a terrible problem. In fact I think the section on C, especially the explanation of interrupts, is so well written the assembly references were only a small distraction.

Of note I found this book more helpful than any Intro/beginner AVR book-- and I've tried a half dozen of them. On the other hand, by the time I got this book I was looking for an explanation of interrupts whereas I recall reading an AVR book and being surprised an interrupt wasn't when your program crashed.

From other reviewers I gather this book serves as a good reference. That's great news for beginners because it also serves as a good introduction.

Customer Rating: 

As someone new to PIC programming, I was pleased with this reference manual. The background information is dry reading but provides a good overview of the PIC landscape while also providing considerable details about the individual chip families.

I appreciated that the authors chose to break the programming of PICs into sections based on different languages. I often find on projects that for various reasons I'm roped into one language or another and it is nice to see that whether you get stuck working in assembly, BASIC, or C, this book has significant coverage.

I expect to use this book regularly!