Review of Beginning Arduino

Beginning Arduino [Paperback]

Michael McRoberts (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Arduino-Michael-McRoberts

The book I ordered on getting started with Arduino arrived yesterday. Grabbed some coffee and read the first 250 pages. The book was clearly written for people  who have not done much breadboard design and not written and compiled c code. That said, the book provides a nice introduction to using the Arduino micro controller, the IDE and working with sensors.

If you have written c or c++ on a regular basis, you should be able to quickly skim a large part of the book. The code examples and projects were easy to follow straight forward. Even if you have written a large amount of code, I would still recommend the book as it will get you in the right mind set for the level of sophisitcation in the code. It will also get you thinking about how to manage pin configurations and connections so that projects can be re-produced.

 There were several things I did not like about the book. There seemed to be a lot of formatting errors (e.g., the columns had the wrong labels, values were split across columns, clear search/replace errors, etc). There were also several examples where 3.1412 was used for PI. Also, the code was not formatted very well making it difficult to parse.

Overall, I think it was a good place to start. Next steps are to write a little code and turn on some lights....