Product Description

This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that's taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. "Getting Started with Arduino" gives you lots of ideas for Arduino projects and helps you get going on them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is right in the book.Inside, you'll learn about: Interaction design and physical computing; The Arduino hardware and software development environment; Basics of electricity and electronics; Prototyping on a solder less breadboard; Drawing a schematic diagram; And more. With inexpensive hardware and open-source software components that you can download free, getting started with Arduino is a snap. To use the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. Join the tens of thousands of hobbyists who have discovered this incredible (and educational) platform. Written by the co-founder of the Arduino project, with illustrations by Elisa Canducci, "Getting Started with Arduino" gets you in on the fun! This 128-page book is a greatly expanded follow-up to the author's original short PDF that's available on the Arduino website.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9719 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project and has worked for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas. He spent 4 years at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea as Associate Professor. Massimo has taught workshops and has been a guest speaker at institutions like: Architectural Association - London, Hochschule f r Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, Hochschule f r Gestaltung Schw bisch Gm nd, FH Potsdam, Domus Academy, Medialab Madrid, Escola Superior de Disseny Barcelona, ARS Electronica Linz, Mediamatic Amsterdam, Doors of Perception Amsterdam.

Before joining IDII he was CTO for the Seat Ventures incubator. He spent many years working as a software architect,both in Milan and London, on projects for clients like Italia Online, Sapient, Labour Party, BT, MCI WorldCom, SmithKlineBeecham, Storagetek, BSkyB and boo.com.

Customer Reviews

Too simple, too short
This starts at an extremely simple and accessible level. If you've never handled a bare LED before, then it's pitched at exactly the right place to begin. The basics of setting up the Arduino IDE and a "Hello World"-level pushbutton to LED program are given.

The trouble is that this is about as far as the book goes. It assumes you know nothing to start with (a good thing), but doesn't leave you much further along at the end of it. If it were twice the length, then it might achieve more.

There's nothing in here that's reference material. Once you're through this book once (an evening, maybe two) you're finished with it.

There's little inspiration in here. It's not a patch on, "Making Things Talk". It tries hard enough, but there just isn't space. The integration between Processing on a desktop to analyse an RSS feed and then communicate by serial over USB to the Arduino and some LEDs is a good idea, but the clarification between Sketch and Processing could have been made more obvious (just some different typography would have helped).

This is a good book if you're running one-day workshops for kids with no hardware knowledge at all. It does handle starting from scratch very well, it just doesn't go far enough to really spark interest.

If you already knew what an Arduino was before looking at this book though, then you don't need it. Start with the online refs, and keep looking for a really good tutorial to getting started with the Arduino.

Probably misses its ideal target audience.
When computing technology is made usable for the non-technical mind, great things can ensue. That makes it all the more regrettable that artistically creative people tend, as a generalization, to shy away from technology. When it is possible to mix the power of the technology with the creativity these people have, you get some truly magical results.

I think that is the kind of magic this book is trying to enable; making technology approachable for people who are usually not at all interested in technology for its own sake. I don't think the book fails, in fact I think it succeeds quite well. However, I think the packaging and - most of all - the title will attract the wrong audience. The title is bound to draw in techies who want to learn about Arduino (a ready made low cost board with AVR microcontroller with lots of I/O that's really easy to use, since you ask). The title will definitely not pull in "Non-Techs" - the kind of people who use the words "Geek" and "Nerd" a lot 8-) So, I believe, it will fail to attract the very audience it could most benefit.

Ultimately, the book is saying to the reader "Look! microcontrollers need not be scientific or engineery, they can be fun and intuitive and full of opportunities for artistic expression - like an electronic paint box that let's you paint whatever technology you want". But, that approach only works if you have pulled in the right readers. If you have attracted, as I suspect the packaging will do, people who actually do want a fairly formal engineering approach to learning about this subject then the approach used here will turn them off quite fast.

Repackage the book as "Microcontrollers for the Non-Technical" or something like that, and it's game on! I would highly recommend the book to a Non-Tech who thought they'd never be able to understand computing, but was willing to have one last try at it. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who had trouble with academic learning and wants to learn by doing. But again, I doubt the title will attract those people.

For anyone with a technical bent, the book seems to me way too shallow and short. If you've had any exposure to any kind of basic electronics or electrics before, then you'll find you're skipping quite large sections of what is already a fairly short book. There's probably about 40 pages of hands-dirty learning and the rest is nice to know stuff, or the author's explanation of why the book is like it is. The book also has rather more than usual white space in it (a fair few full and half blank pages).

So, it's an unusual approach to this subject area, and it should be addressing a new audience, an approach that possibly no electronics book has ever tried before. But with this title and packaging it seems probable to me that this new audience may never be attracted to the book. In short, I think the book misses its market.

Getting Started with Arduino
An excellent and concise guide to hooking up and programming the Arduino - probably the fastest way to get up and running. Highly recommended.