PIC Microcontroller Project Book : For PIC Basic and PIC Basic Pro Compliers

great for beginners easy to understand projects with circuits and code to take you from start to finish

I'm afraid I need to disagree with the professor's review. If you are at all interested in the PIC microcontrollers and use of PIC Basic you would be best served looking elsewhere for inspiration. John Iovine's book is poorly written in so many ways that even someone new to microcontrollers would find very little use for it. Aside from his writing style being somewhat confusing, this book is full of outdated information. With a publishing date of 2004 I was suprised to find so much information applied to applications and hardware from the 90's inside. Aside from this, which in and of itself is reason enough not to waste your time or money on it, he doesn't list any resources in his text. For example, he makes mention of serial LCD's, but doesn't provide any specific examples of vendors or models and makes claim that they all work the same, which is not true. His projects are the same basic beginners projects you can find all over the internet for free and are less descriptive than those you might find elsewhere. There isn't a single PCB design in the book and he demonstrates all of his projects with a breadboard. Most unfortunate, is the pictures he provides of the finished breadboards - they are taken at an angle, far enough away from the breadboard that not only could you not use the picture to validate your own breadboard design, you can barely tell what is what on the breadboard at all. On top of everything else, he explores only the PIC16F84 chip, which while one of the more popular chipsets ever produced by Microchip, is also outdated information since Microchip has since updated this to the PIC16F84A model and he doesn't cover any other chipset in any detail. One or two of his projects and examples show a different chipset in the schematic, but that's about it. His exploration of the BASIC language is no more or less descriptive than, say, the users guide of the PIC Basic language itself (which you can get for free). There are also many omissions and errors throughout the book, specifically as they apply to his projects. For example, his H-Bridge DC motor controller design is not smokeless (you could easily fry the PIC and/or other components in this design) and is missing several key components (like capacitors) that would prevent the design from working in a real world application. He also has a half a dozen or so shameless plugs throughout the book pointing you to 'other books he has written' to get more information - if this book is any example of what you might find in his other books, you'd be best to stay away from this author altogether. The cover of this book claims it is 'Completley updated and revised' - I guess this means the first edition was really horrible, the second edition is, in my opinion, simply not worth the read.

OK

I'm a non-engineer and have 5 profitable real-world patents and need to use microcontrollers in some of my designs. The problem I have always had with PIC software is that the people teaching about them cant' seem to see that I just want to make them do things for me. I don't care about details important to the wonk. It's not that the author doesn't present the knowledge well, he just spent way too much time on the why as opposed to the how. Lots of examples is what I need together with progressively more complex applications is the kind of teaching I need. Microchip is even worse at catering to users who already get it, as opposed to people who could be their customers if they could figure out how to use their products. I believe that the Arduino success is due to the failure of chipmakers and authors to seize the opportunity.

Very Disappointing. Unless you're willing to spend an additional $250 for a PicBasic Pro Compilier or $100 for the PicBasic Compilier as well as $60 for a development board, don't waste your money. The way the book is written, you need these items to be able to follow along with what the author is saying. I already have a PIC programmer (K8076) and was looking for some application examples. What this book provided were software examples in PICBasic. Almost all the illustrations were of PICBasic program listings. Very little was spent going over the PIC architecture. After reading the book, things like timing functions, interrupts, triggers, Powerup routines, Watchdog examples, etc. were not covered from a microcontroller perspective. The author never explains how these PICBasic features work on the microcontroller. A better title of the book would be "Programming a PIC in PICBasic." The PIC microcontroller instruction set was never illustrated, or referenced in the entire book. Only one block diagram of the PIC. No explanations of the reserved registers. No examples of accessing the flash or non-volatile memory. Non of the control registers were mentioned. Only PICBasic commands. It would be like trying to teach someone about the intel microprocessors by listing programs written in Basic.If I picked this book up at an actual book store, after leafing through the chapters, I would have put it back on the shelf and moved on.

Its a very comprehensive text, especially when you are new to Pics as I'm and is about to get your feet all wet.

great!!

This book is maybe OK but the first half of the book covers a evaluation board and the operating program of one certain type of PIC. Even if I wanted wanted to buy the board and program, I couldn't afford it anyways. Waste of money if you want a more basic understanding of general PICS which that is what I thought the book PICS Basics was. I guess I misunderstood and thought it meant the basics of PICs.

Does help to get you on the 'page' so-to-speak.Books like this are always very helpful if you need a helping hand and who doesen't?