PBP Book

cheerz.....

Bruce,

Any update on the book? Is it going to happen anytime soon?

I'm about half way there, but I can't honestly say when it will be finished.
It's something I can only work on in my spare time.

How on earth dare you to have ANY spare time? :D

Bruce:
Would you please post any updates on your PBP book? Or is it already out and I missed it?
Thanks,
Urmish

Be hard business writing books. Big gamble if you don't have a guaranteed publisher lined up for it. Heck you could spend a year of your time only to find that no one wants to publish it. I love the thought of writing a book on making games in Visual Basic, so close, I'm almost all there with it. Too skeptical about seriously doing it though.

Well Bruce started this thread in April 2006, so if Bruce is about half way through by mid February '07..... It should be in the shops in time for this coming Christmas :) :)

A new 3rd edition of "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill was close to being published like a year or two ago. There were preorders taken. An electronics Bible. I know one problem is what to include as electronics keeps changing.

Anyone know the current status?

Norm

Don't forget to explain tons of config FUSES of 18F series in detail.

I was just cruising the forum after being gone for quite a while and saw this string of posts on Bruce's book. I wish him luck. When I wrote "Programming PIC Microcontrollers with PicBasic" I had no idea how much work would be involved. For every single page printed there were 15 in the trash. It took me 2 1/2 years from start to publisher release and by then half the book was a bit dated. In the end though it's worth it if you help just one person get started. The email feedback you get is mostly positive and that is one of the rewards.
As Melanie stated it doesn't pay well for the hours put in. You do it because you want to pass on your knowledge and help future generations of programmers get started with the art of programming. At least that's why I still do it.

Keep plugging away Bruce. I'm sure it will be a great book.

As Melanie said, a pdf or html version will quickly end up as a free download link on pirate boards. looking forward to it. (erm, the book, not stealing it.) so how does pulsin work again?

Any progress on the book ? As others have said (and without putting anyone else's down) Bruce's code snips and suggestions are always valued.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the kudos. It's a lot slower process than I had first thought, but it's around 3/4
done now. I'm not big on books with bugs in code or schematics, so I'm taking my time to
build & test every single thing that goes into it. That and breaking down all the technical
mumbo-jumbo from PIC datasheets into laymans' terms is the real time hog.

Also - changes to the compiler and a ton of new PICs' set it back a long way.

Gotta pay the rent 1st, and work on the book in whatever spare time I can find, but I'll try
to have it done before I croak - or everything changes again...;o}

Here's an idea in the how-to-eat-a-chocolate-elephant spirit: why not start publishing/selling it in chapters / sections ? Yes there are piracy problems with a downloadable version but you will get some return and if you try and wait for the entire finished product and sell as paper&ink you might find that the ever advancing wave of progress means you can never publish because the first half is already obsolete.

Andrew

lots of pictures, no big words, mulitable examples, low pin count flash chips (12f675, 16f676),
Bi-Direction serial communication (may something like the LanC protocol), RF,Data,
and most important "data sheets for dummies"
just to give you a few ideals

when and were do I send my money.
grounded

Hi Bruce,

I'm very interested in your book also.

Quote:

---

when and were do I send my money.

---

:) and it make's 2

.

Count me in too! Please keep it to PBP and PBPL. Most books just repeat everything in PB and PBP, so when you're done you can only flash LED's. The formats used for the advanced BS2 books are good, too. Timers and more advanced topics especially the internal register settings, and direct reference to the datasheet sections, comparators Vref and the like. Goog luck with the project.

Bruce,

I guess I missed this thread when it started. And I've just scanned it quickly so I apologize if I am restating something already suggested.

I find the PBP manual fairly complete except for its dearth of examples. More detailed examples would eliminate a lot of questions or, at the very least, justify a RTFM response.

As for whether it should be bound or HTML of PDF, it's simple to offer both bound and PDF through something like http://www.lulu.com who do a really high quality one-off bound book at reasonable prices and with little upfront cost to the author.

I have this book http://www.pb-beginners.co.uk/ and I'm sure its author would answer your questions about the self publishing process.

Thanks Dave. Lulu looks like one way to go for the self-publishing end. I do plan to offer the book on CD as well - in .html format. this would allow people to download new updates, projects & new code examples.

Hi Bruce,

Why don't you pre-sell your book to your readers before it goes to print?

1. Finish your book.
2. Get an estimate for the book printing job.
3. Put a sample chapter on your web site and do some advertisement for your book.
4. Pre-sell your book (paper version only).
5. When the presell covers the printing cost (150%), go to print with your book.
6. Send an-email to your readers with a picture of the book and ask for the money.
7. Cash the money and send the book to your readers. (Paper version only).
8. Repeat steps 4 to 7 for book reprint.
9. When no more reprint, sell your book as e-book from your web site.
10. Give a free e-book to all the readers who have purchased the paper version of the book.

In case 5 is not achieved, then you can sell your book as e-book and avoid financial loss.

* * *

I am sure your book will be a must-read for PicBasic developers.

I wish you great success with this project!

Best regards,

Luciano

I just bought a book by a well known PIC author, which was self published. In my opinion self published work suffers 1 serious drawback, and that is, no objective but nasty fanny flogging editor to keep you on the straight and narrow. The book I bought is about 200 pages of near nothing. The first 1/2 detailed how to install the MPLAB suite , the second half had more whitespace than anything else. The margins, headers and footers are huge. The book required several chapters to blink an LED, and featured about 8 near full page pictures of the same PICKIT demo board. That said, the book was printed in USA, on a very nice high quality white paper. Aside from endless repeats of the little code he actually provided,(space filler?), I found this book to be useful as a primmer, it should have either been trimmed to about 50 pages or printed in enormus type to fill the 200 pages.
Bruce, your website has 10 times the code, than any 5 books I have seen, and your code is always well written, I hope you will publish the book, I will buy it, just avoid the pitfalls I listed above and you WILL have a winner.

Well.. "late reply" but the book still seem to be "in progress" so :)

I own two picbasic books and the picbasic manual.

PBP manual from MElabs (came with PBP)
PIC microcontroller project book by John Iovine (Bought it new)
PIC robotics by John Iovine. (Bought it used very cheap on ebay)

The far most useful is the PBP manual, PMPB is good in many ways,
and the last one (PIC robotics) isn't that useful, that is more aimed to people
that never used PB/PBP and have very little knowledge of electronics in general.

The main bad thing about PMPB is that it covers ALOT of junk you're not interested in, like how you setup your software and how pbp/pb works on the commandline and so on, this stuff is already covered in the manual! ..I have no use at all of the first chapters, and I guess that goes for most people.

I (and I guess most people ?) would likle to see a manual that goes in more deep into different things.. like one chapter about sensors (wich actually is present in PMPB) that covers different types of sensors, how they work, different ideas on how to connect them, and how to use PBP to read them.. Ideas and examples, More solutions than a manual.

..I also dont like the fact that the books covers both PB and PBP, I guess thats great for the author that can sell the book to more people, but if you already have PBP you arnt that interested in PB really.

Hi Bruce,
BTW, I am going to want my copy autographed !

I think Luciano has offered some good sound advice ...

Incidentally, I am planning to write a book on video game programming in Visual Basic .NET, and I will be taking a similar direction. But my main motivation is not for money. I have produced a near identical clone of Pacman in .NET, and I believe that I have a lot of knowledge to offer with this book.

Take care all,

Trent Jackson

well, one copy anyways. want to send one to a friend of mine, and it'd be cool if it was signed. lol i see a limited collectors edition autographed copy in the future? you can get Melanie to come up with all the leather accessories.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nomad

. . . you can get Melanie to come up with all the leather accessories.

---

OOOO you Devil . . . watch it or you might get spanked . . .

Interestingly, I've found the devil, just down the road from me at Wisemans Ferry Rd Gunderman NSW Australia 2775.

Get ready to run Sue.

Hopefully the book is still moving along......

All i can suggest is to cover the PICBASIC commands in a MORE depth.

Most of the PBP manual is a cruel joke to say the least, the "examples" (for want of a better term) are very light, and could have easily added a few more variations of how to use the instructions in different scenario's.

I have several other PBP-Project books which all cover PBP commands too, However, they've done nothing more than COPY the text out of the PBP manual, so having those books hasn't been advantageous to me.
(i bought these books to learn more about using PBP in various projects, and feel somewhat short-changed from them).

My apologies if i'm harsh, but i'd like to see a unique PBP book come out, not a duplicate of the manual :)

Regards,
Marty.

Hello Bruce,
If you do get your book finished/published And if autographed, please jus let me know WHERE to send my $75.00 contribution to the care and feeding of BRUCE.
BTW The SAME OFFER for Darrel and Melanie. Heck considering the efforts put in by all of you, if there was a collective effort, I might even go as far as $125. Seriously, you guys and gals are in a league of your own.

NOW BEFORE THE FLAMES START, let me say that THE LIST IS NOT COMPLETE.
There are MANY OTHERS, Steve and Jerson also come to mind.
What I am saying is this .....
REWARD those who publish outstanding works!!!!

Sneaky-geek

Hi, GTV-Geek

You do forget a full MINE of PBP enlightments ...

The Basic Stamp Application manuals ... ( have a look before answering ... lol )

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/440/Default.aspx

But, as You'll also understand there ... it's a learning GUIDE.

YOU WON'T LEARN TO USE PBP IN A BOOK BUT ON YOUR BREADBOARD ...


Alain

Silly me to look thru my Picbasic Book to learn about Picbasic...

I would have never thought to look at someone elses book to learn about PBP. :cool:

That's it ! i'm gonna race out and buy a Linux book to study windows XP. :rolleyes:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by gtvmarty

That's it ! i'm gonna race out and buy a Linux book to study windows XP. :rolleyes:

---

It would help you understand what Microsoft was/is trying to do with vista :)
But I think they skipped a couple of chapters.

Bruce,
I look forward to your book!
Make sure you include a tutorial on how to set config fuses and where to find the info for most PIC chips. This was a major learning curve hurdle for me when I was learning PICBASIC and how to program PIC MCUs.
Regards, jellis00

Three and a half years on... is the book anywhere near completion ?

Thing is that since it's conception PBP has probably been released with 3 or 4 revisions....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bruce

Hello All,

I'm working on a book for PBP, and would like to solicit some feedback on a
few things before moving along with it.

Primarily, I'm looking for feedback on what people would prefer as for content
and book format.

The book focuses on two major areas.

1. How to use each PBP command & a detailed introduction on what each
command requires the user to setup manually before using the command.

For example; What do "I" need to do first before using ADCIN, HSEROUT, etc,
and when it may be more advantageous/appropriate for someone to configure
certain hardware registers/peripherals manually. A good example of this is for
someone using hardware PWM, or looking to use the PIC hardware USART
without the over-head of PBP commands, and for added flexibility.

I.E. as some folks already know, using a PIC with 3 hardware PWM ports,
HPWM is obviously not the way to go.

2. How to read & interpret those 500+ page PIC data sheets. This involves
putting info in PIC data sheets into laymans terms that the novice can
actually understand.

So, my questions are;

1. What do you feel would be missing from the information provided as
outlined above?

2. Would people prefer printed & bound VS a book in .HTML format?

The book was originally designed in HTML format. I.E. it will come on CD
ROM,and viewable with any browser. This is due to the heavy graphic
content that makes this type of book prohibitively expensive to publish and
allows me to keep pricing down.

By including a large number of graphics, the book can explain things in great
detail with actual photo's & schematics. My argument for this approach is that
nothing is left to the imagination. The picture/schematic shows everything in
detail.

3. What do you feel is left unexplained, or could use more detailed information
on, in the PBP manual?

4. Would you like to see a section on using the 18F series with PBP?

5. How about a section on using newer full-speed USB PIC's?

Note that my intention is not to produce a PBP project book. I would prefer
to make it a book that leaves the reader with a firm understanding of how
PBP works, and how to read & interpret PIC data sheets. I think once these
two areas are understood the reader can produce pretty much anything they
want with PBP, and a PIC.

Any & all feedback would be appreciated.

---

Bruce
This sounds like a book most people here really need myself included especially item 2 how to wade through that datasheet.
May be a section on porting code from asm to picbasic nothing to elaborate just something to help people get started.
I think the cd option is the best way to keep it affordable
I volunter too proof read your book when it's done
Steve with over 1900 post's you've already wrote a book

PLEASE make it in the form of a PRINTED book, (or a PDF that WE can print)! Some of us old timers still prefer an open book on the table, with a highlighter, to anything else!

I'm in for a copy.

Bruce,

I too like the feel of paper. I find that scanning the printed page is easier than "FIND NEXT".

Please include an INDEX. That is a big issue for me.

Please include a technical description of the path from BASIC to ASSEMBLER to HEX. Please tell us what is an INCLUDE file. What is a MACRO. What is an EXTENSION.

Your good book combined with MikroElektonika's PIC "MICROCONTROLLERS with examples in Assembly Language" would make all this much easier.

Ken

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by schu4647

I agree with Melanie except for the completeness of the PBP manual. I think there are a lot of holes. A couple examples:

1)I posted a question on here about pulsin. Lets say I want to check the pulse length of a high signal. The book doesn't say if it waits for a leading edge, or if it will just start counting when the instruction starts and the pin is high. I never got an answer. I ended up puting an if then statement to start this command when the pin is low.

2)For LCDout you need to put a $FE for commands. The manual does not explain why this is. Someone in here told me that $FE makes the enable bit high while leaving it out lets the enable bit go low.

These are both things that you would have to either find in the manual or have developed PBP to know. I don't think that anyone but MELABS could write a book that explains this.

---

There's more to these statements than it appears on the surface (and why I applaud anyone that writes a book, does tech support, etc). I see many posts referring to commands from the PBP manual like #1 here, but if you look in the manual they just don't hold up. This is a good example: "The book doesn't say if it waits for a leading edge,"...
Read the first paragraph from the manual (I broke it out into "steps"):
1.) Measures pulse width on Pin (ok, good, that's what we want).
2.) If State is zero (0), the width of a low pulse is measured (measured width placed in Var)
3.) If State is one (1), the width of a high pulse is measured (measured width stored in Var).
4.) If the pulse edge never happens...Var is set to zero (0).
Skipping ahead...
5.) PULSIN normally waits a maximum of 65535 counts before it determines there is no pulse ( which can be adjusted via a DEFINE).

So, the manual does in fact tell you exactly what it is doing. How much more information needs to be contained in the explanation for it to be clear what's going on? Is there a different manual than the one I have (I've bought PBP for myself many years ago, as well as for three different companies I've done consulting work for and got the same manual). Or, as is so often the case, has someone assumed that they "knew" what the command did?

On the second statement about the LCDOUT command I ask (and this kind of goes to what Melanie said) "How much information is enough"? The first paragraph clearly says "PBP supports LCD modules with a Hitachi 44780 controller or equivalent". To me, this means more than RTFM; it means read ALL the data for ALL the components used in a design. I have a copy of the 44780 data sheet and understand what all the commands are doing and why. This goes to what I refer to the current state of "Lego electronics"; plug stuff together and assume it will work. When it doesn't do what you "thought" blame the module, code "example", compiler - everyone but yourself.

No one book is a panacea. No one reference can tell you everything.

Mike Tripoli

I have recently retired and although I have been wishing to get to grips with PIC programming for a number of years, previous work commitments meant there was never enough free time. I have dabbled in electronics so have a rudimentary understanding of the hardware aspects but am now finding it difficult to find publications pitched at the right level to get started with PBPro.

What I would like to see in the book is a section for those who know nothing. For example, I see a code such as ADCON = 7 and it's not apparent to a complete beginner what this means (I know now). I imagine that there may be many like me, who given the base information in a clear and concise form, can work forward, but without it will struggle, not start or may give up.

Clearly any technical publication is always a balance between being oversimplified and overcomplex. In my experience in other fields they can fail to meet their audiences needs by leaving holes between the simple introduction then leaping into the complexities. You feel as though you are getting to grips, then are left floundering. This can be difficult for an expert to put together and can benefit by testing on novices. (Happy to help)

I don't think this introduction needs to be overly long, but it does need to be carefully constructed to provide a sound understanding.

Others are much better placed to comment on other aspects of what should be included based on their actual experiences, however I would look for plenty of worked examples to help me construct my own programs.

I hope this is helpful

regards

David

Bruce,

I think you were intending to write a PIC book some time ago?

If you are still going to do it, I'd be pleased to provide some input, not because of any technical skills on my part but I started learning about PICs three years ago and the difficulties/mysteries are still fairly fresh in my mind.

Let me know if you want some input.

The 'two stepper' code is working very well and I've posted it on this site. The plotter scanner is great fun and the mechanics are pretty smooth - courtesy of cheap Chinese linear bearing that appeared on eBay a few month ago (About $10 each instead of $+++ for the 'proper' ones).

Regards Bill Legge