What I want to know, looking at everyone’s comments is “Where do you draw the line?”.

Now I’ll get seriously flamed for this (like I care), but I’ll say it anyway. The PICBasic manual as it stands is 90% of the way there. The other 10% is in your PICs Datasheet.

If you don’t know how to program in Basic – go to night school.

If you don’t know electronics – go get a course at your local college.

But what I see is folks tinkering with things they haven’t a clue about, asking others for help and then not understanding the answers they’re given. How do you connect a Matrix Keypad to your PIC? – well I can think of at least six different ways of doing it – including two completely different ways that use just one I/O pin for a whole 4x4 Matrix Keypad… how many examples will we put in the book?, because I’ll bet the one you don’t put in is the one somebody’s going to moan about that you haven’t got.

I’m sorry to say this Bruce, and please prove me wrong in a couple of years time, but you’ll end up writing a complete microprocessor electronics course encompassing everything from basic Ohms Law (ie how to calculate a potential divider so as not to overload your PICs input pins) through to why the slowest peripherals should be given the greatest interrupt priority (bet nobody on this list ever thought of that one!). Then after spending six months of your life on your publication, it’ll take a further sixty just to recoup the initial investment in time and money.

Go look at Heathkit Educational Courses… big binders full of basic but useful stuff (costing a fortune) but that’s exactly what it cost to produce. And to be really useful to everyone, that’s what it will end up as – you just won’t be able to do it for $19.95 and whilst a HTML/CD version is great, the instant you start selling it, it’ll be ripped-off and published for free somewhere on the net.

Back to my original question – “Where do you draw the line?”. Some time back a colleague of mine produced an excellent Accounts package for the PC. He was swamped with support calls with brainless questions like “What’s a Nominal Ledger?”, “What’s Depreciation?”, “What’s a Balance Sheet?”. Whilst his manual was great for setting up and using the product, he forgot that the users were totally inept, didn’t have a clue about Accounting and expected his product manual to be a complete Accounts Course.

In the same way, the PICBasic manual is a Product Manual and not a Programming Course. They provide you with information about a command or feature, and they make the assumption (perhaps wrong assumption) that you know what you’re doing. Which means any attempt to expand on that becomes a training course in programming and electronics.

Never mind Sleepless in Seattle, call me Cynical from London.