PBP Book

[Archangel]

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.

[Glenn]

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.

[Archangel]

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

[T.Jackson]

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

[nomad]

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.

[Archangel]

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

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

[T.Jackson]

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.

[gtvmarty]

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.