Customer Reviews

Embedded C Programming and the Microchip PIC

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A very good textbook for undergraduate learning MCU programming. This book is based on CCS C complier, a step-by-step guide from basic C programming to project planning.

For a Newbie on PIC C programming like me, this is really an excellent book. It teaches C language programming, helping the reader to create an entire program (step-by-step). Also, the reader can understand the PIC architecture and learn how use a C compiler (like CCS C). Finally, the reader can learn and try to implement a complete project using microcontrollers. I recommend this book to anyone who is thinking to make a travel through the field of microcontrollers and embedded programming.

Unlike most PIC books which focus on coding in assembler, this book uses the CCS C compiler for all of its examples. It provides simple solid C examples that show what needs to be done. An embedded C tutorial in the front of the book reviews the language. Excercises (With some solutions in an appendix) at chapter end help you know what you understood and where you need more work. The appendix of library functions repeats what is available in the CCS help so I did not find it useful. Maybe it would be to someone who didn't have the compiler. Overall, this book helped me find how to do what I needed to with a minimum of reading irrelevant information and that's really the highest praise I can give to an instructional book. I recomend this book to any experienced programmer who wants to get started with PIC development.

Provided you have NO knowledge on C programming and microcontroller, otherwise you dont really need this book. I personally think that big portion of contents could be found in CCS's manual and sample code FREE.

Anyway, this book is more readable than the manual as it is more well-arranged, together with some explanation and diagram. This could be helpful to beginner with NO prior knowledge on embedded C programming.

I had high expectations for this book and unfortunately it didn't deliver like I had hoped. I was trying to learn how to program PICs in C and this book starts its tutorials with the classic printf("Hello World"); example. This isn't useful for an embedded design since my PIC doesn't have a printer or monitor attached to it yet, so I read the rest of the book and did the exercises in text without actually doing any programming. The final chapter assumes that you have C programming down by that point so it is dedicated to the fundamentals of how to organize a project, which is a huge system design of an electronic scooter using the CAN bus. Overall this whole chapter/project wasn't all that useful or interesting to me, so I skipped it. Though I read all of the text and did the exercises, at the end of the day, I still couldn't program my PIC in C. I had a decent understanding of syntax and such when I got done, but it wasn't until I read Martin P. Bates book Programming 8-bit PIC Microcontrollers in C: with Interactive Hardware Simulation that I was able to actually get anything written in C to load into my processor.

That said, this book does what it says it does and addresses C programming for the PICs and not a computer. I have found it useful for giving more in depth explanations of what is in the CCS users guide.

I am giving this book 3 stars because it is quite expensive and has turned out to essentially just be a supplement to the CCS documentation, which is already really good, so I doubt that I will be using this book that much.