Beginning Arduino Programming (Technology in Action)

I taught an introductory Physical Computing course recently, and I evaluated several Arduino books before selecting this book as a primary resource for my students. I chose it because:1) It does not require any previous programming experience (the biology major who had never programmed in her life picked up programming just fine).2) The sequence of topics it follows feels logical to me. It walks through various aspects of the physical, electronic side of Arduino development, and it introduces relevant programming topics as it goes in natural places.3) It does a good job of *teaching programming*. Several books either assume you know the basics already or else provide more of a dry reference than actual explanation of programming concepts. The explanations in this book are good.And it worked quite well. The book is well-written and clear, with good examples used throughout. It does not serve as a reference, but that is what the large amount of online Arduino resources are for (you can easily get to most just from the main Arduino site: [...] I pointed my students to those resources, and the book then provided a good structure to guide their exploration, referring to other references as needed. ("The book introduces PWM here? I see... Yes, that makes sense. Now let's go to the language reference to get a precise description of each PWM function.") And it provides that structure very well. This book, paired with free online resources (and either a knowledgeable teacher/friend or an account on an Arduino forum to ask questions), is a very good way for a beginner to get into the Arduino.As the book is dedicated to programming, it does not get into the electronics side of physical computing as much as it could. That said, the chapter on the basics of electricity and electronics was a very clear primer on all of the important concepts. And like I said, I wanted a book that taught programming well, as I believe that is the more difficult side of physical computing, by far, for a beginner.

This is a good book to learn the structure, syntax and instruction set for the Arduino programming language. I wouldn't recommend it as the first book for someone who knows absolutely nothing about writing programs in a high level language but it is great for someone who perhaps used basic, fortran or some other structured language in the past. With a little prior knowledge you will quickly pick up on the basics of the Arduino language and will be off and running in short order. The examples are excellent and the author clearly walks the reader thru what is happening and why. It was a perfect first book for me to get started programming Arduino but as I noted, I have had some prior experience.Cons: 1) Author uses some pretty fancy code to illustrate a point at times. He is trying to demonstrate how to use some of the powerful statements of the language but it may confuse a newby. 2) Doesn't comment his source. A nice feature but in his defense, he does a good job explaining the code in the text. 3) Doesn't include much in the way of language reference which is really what I wanted in a beginning book (e.g., a complete list of statements, syntax, etc. in a appendix).Good book for the right reader!!

Everyone has different needs when it comes to programming books, more often than not I find myself looking for that one book that will cover a certain niche just to find that it goes over the same basics with little detail.This one does a good job of covering all of the bases, and the author takes the time (and pages) to explain what is going on in very good detail.The examples are well rounded, and as I said, the author goes to great lengths to explain what is happening in the code. No previous coding experience is assumed or required.If you have zero programming experience, then this book will get you going in no time at all. If you have a decent amount of programming experience (mine is mostly in BASIC), then the transition from your native language to the C programming language used in this book will be fairly painless.If C is your native language, but the Arduino platform is new to you, then the examples in the book will greatly help in getting you familiarized with the Arduino platform.

I purchased this together with Monk Simon's Programming Arduino: Getting Started With Sketches. This book does very well for a complete Arduino newbie such as myself. However, I needed to pick out points from both books to get things going. This book does go into great detail, and with lots of examples. Within two months, I was able to implement an Arduino based project for work. This is now my 'go-to' book when I forget things. This is a thorough beginner's book - highly recommended.

There are some things missing that I would have liked in this book and for the life of me what those things are escape me right now but it's definitely nothing that will set you back. They were things that I think should have been added to complement the other material in the book.I actually chose to use this book as a textbook for an intro to arduino course I teach so I definitely think this is a great book for those getting started in arduino. I mainly used it to teach programming though, I created my own projects for the class.I like that the book focuses on learning the language more than just doing projects. A lot of these books will have you do projects and then introduce one new piece of code. This is a nice way of learning... if you have time to do all the projects, I'd rather teach the code and let them decide which projects they want to do.

Unlike some others, this book does not require previous C/C++ programming experience. It does help to have some knowledge of programming in general.The code is not commented, but it is talked about in the text. I found it an interesting exercise to commment it myself.

The book came in good time, in better shape than I expected, and very nicely packaged. Impressive!