Product Description

This book includes 15 programming and constructional projects, and covers the range of AVR chips currently available, including the recent Tiny AVR. No prior experience with microcontrollers is assumed.

John Morton is author of the popular PIC: Your Personal Introductory Course, also published by Newnes.

*The hands-on way of learning to use the Atmel AVR microcontroller
*Project work designed to put the AVR through its paces
*The only book designed to get you up-and-running with the AVR from square one

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #510925 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

A good introduction, but marred by errors
This book takes a structured, step-by-step approach to software and hardware development with the AVR microcontrollers. As such, it should have merited 5 stars.

But, it suffers from one minor and two major defects.

First, and least importantly, the writing style is rather variable. It's the exclamation marks that get me annoyed! This gives some sections a rather breathless gosh-wow feel to them!

Second, and more severely, typographical errors abound. While these will be obvious to many seasoned developers, the target audience of new AVR users will be flummoxed by them. One early section uses 320 ohm resistors (try finding them - the common value is 330 ohm), and repeatedly uses an OUT instruction to read a port value (it should be IN).

Lastly, this appears to be a based on Mr Morton's previous book on PIC microcontrollers, to the point that one of the appendices is headed "Table of PICs". This leads to some problems in the hardware designs, particularly with driving LED displays. The AVR can only drive LEDs reasonably well using one type of connection, and it is not the way that most of the LEDs in this book are wired up. Many of the designs omit current limiting resistors, too. This can lead to (at best) bad practice, and (at worst) dead chips.

I hope that these errors will have been rectified for edition 2.

AVR: an Introductory Course
This book is very useful, especially if you've had experience of other microcontrollers, such as Microchip's PIC.

Unlike in some books, the worked projects are actually useful and easy to folllow.

There a a few strange things about the book (such as binary numbers with a bit missing), but the detailed explanations easily make up for it.

It only focuses on assembly code, not C, but usefully shows how to use Atmel's compling tools and simulator. The quick-reference guides at the back are definately a bonus as well.

A great introduction
The friendly styles of the author's work helps the reader through the difficult areas, and ensures that the read is both pleasant and illuminating. Many examples are provided and there is no doubt that the book will provide the head-start needed in this area.