Atmel AVR Microcontroller Primer: Programming and Interfacing

This book was surprisingly disappointing. The first good thing about this book is the author does not attempt to teach you how to program in C--thank God! There are already countless books on that subject matter. The second strength of this little book is that the authors get straight to the point.Any weaknesses? Yes. In fact, there are too many to list so I'll only mention the major faults. First, this book's print quality is atrocious. Most of the images and diagrams are copied straight out of the ATMega16 datasheet. Unfortunately, the author clearly did not clean up the images, nor used images with sufficient resolution for a reasonable print quality. The second major weakness is that the authors do not talk about everything in detail. For example, if you were to look at the table of contents here on Amazon, you would expect a thorough explanation on TWI, in chapter 2. Sadly the authors had only allocated two short paragraphs on TWI. How can you put this in the table of contents if you did not even mention anything worth reading!?!?! Holly fiddlesticks! I could have read more information on TWI on Wikipedia. I almost suspect it is in the table of contents to mislead potential buyers that this book is complete. It's far from it! Granted--I'll give the authors a break in that the title mentions that this is a primer. However, the book only has 177 pages (with fairly large font) and the authors continually make such excuses as, "space does not permit a detailed discussion of this" blah blah blah. The authors make this excuse repeatedly. The third major setback is that this book has a few mistakes and blatant omissions. If you are going to talk about a register and the meaning of each bit, then make sure you completely explain all of the bits. Also, if you are already familiar with using the IO pins on AVRs then you will notice that the first chapter fails to mention that the PINx register can also be used to read the output (the authors only mention that this register is used for reading the input). The book fails to be as thorough as it should. I find this extremely frustrating because I bought this to avoid trying to learn how to use this MCU's features from the datasheet. However, if you do buy this book then make sure you print out the datasheet because YOU WILL NEED IT! Finally, the code examples are formatted poorly and have silly things like declaring variables that aren't even used.

The copy I received from Amazon (publisher says from Amazon's print-on-demand at order time service) was very poor print quality, and a large number of pages, example code, tables, diagrams were competely unreadable. The publisher sent me a replacement copy at their expense from their own printer, which is very good print quality.This book serves as a decent introduction to microcontrollers and the AVR in particular, giving descriptions of what things such as EEPROM, TWI, PWM, ADC, USART, etc. are and do, and how to talk to them in C code. Talks about interrupt theory and how to use them in C code, looks liek a good bit od discussion and example about timer interrupt and timing things. Advanced users will likely skip over some things such as descriptions of different kinds of switches (momentary pushbutton, DIPs). I was hopin gfor a bit more about controlling DC motors than I see here.If you already have experience with micros, this may be a bit elementary for you. If you're new to micros, their features, peripherals, and controlling things, this looks like a good introduction.How do I change from 2 to 4 stars?

This an excellent book filled with many practical examples. Especially helpful are the listing of parts by their numbers.