Bill of materials (BOM),
A BOM (with the specific manufacturer's part number) for each project requiring components would be very nice. I've spent hours at www.digikey.com just trying to figure out which components to buy. Also a nice inclusion would be an overall BOM for the entire book. This would really expedite the whole ordering process. The individual components are relatively inexpensive, but the price seems to add up very quickly. I also found that the suppliers tend to add a $5 handling charge if your order is under $25. Only 3 stars for being disorganized and not including a proper BOM. I haven't started the experiments yet so I can't provide a proper rating for that material. Hopefully the C isn't as difficult to implement as the previous reviewer indicated. Another heads up I almost forgot. The PICkit 1 no longer includes the 14-pin PIC16F684 the book focuses on so make sure to order it separately.
Misleading Title, Full of Errors, Abandoned by Author,
This is a Tale of Two Books.
One Book misrepresents itself as a compilation of "123 PIC Projects for the Evil Genius." Wannabe Evil Geniuses everywhere will be mightily annoyed when they find out - after purchase - that this is not at all a listing of evil projects. It gets worse: The book is full of typos and coding errors.
The "Second" book - while physically the same book - is actually/potentially a very good hands-on guide/course to learning PIC Microprocessor programing and system development. The name of the book should be changed to something honest, such as "A Two-Semester PIC Programming Course." Predko is obviously a very good PIC programmer, and his language prose skills (or his re-writer's skills...) are impressive; one of the few authors who uses semicolons consistantly and correctly. Nevertheless, there are many gramatical and wrong-word errors in the text - which can't easily be found with a spell checker. I think after completing all 123 experiments, a reader would be a pretty fair PIC programmer. I imagine two months of every-day effort would be enough to get up to speed. However, as other reviewers have pointed out, even the source code and schematics have errors, so a student or teacher should hesitate to use this books as a one or two semester class unless someone -a summer test student maybe - had taken a run through the entire book and noted all discrepancies. It's not a good start that the author's instructions for initial laoding and setup of PICC LITE and MPLAB IDE don't work as detailed, and that suddenly an unexplained HI-TIDE IDE is offered for download without explanation.
Mostly it bothers that the author seems to have abandoned this book. No forum, no errata list. No forum discussion of HI-TIDE. Did the author just take the money and run ?
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