Monday, May 28, 2007 1:25 PM
<disclosure>I was given this book by the publisher in exchange for reviewing it.</disclosure>
First, I thought that this book would have been a more advanced book, but was sad to see it labeled 'Beginner-Intermediate.' It does however accomadate that audience very well. The book does a good job of taking a sample and slowly building it up to a more complex level. In the future I would love to see this topic at a more advanced level as well, and maybe not so hardware oriented (is that possible?).
Though it was not what I expected, the book covers a lot of very cool ways to talk to hardware toys. If you are into RFID or X10 home automation there are samples of both. I have a friend that is an older gent that is way into hardware and I think I might get him this book as an introduction to programming along with some basic language books. Because this book is hardware oriented be prepared to pay the "lab fee", as you will need to purchase the cool toys for each project.
I personally got a lot out of the chapters on socket and serial programming. It gave me a glimpse of what the forefathers of programming had to deal with, and it left me happy that I don't have to deal with that stuff. Go .Net
Some side notes: The code is presented in both VB.Net and C# which means a lot of the space in the book is wasted on repetive code samples. I would encourage vendors to pick one language, and I challenge the readers to learn enough of the other language to be able to read it in a book.
Go Amazon