Customer Reviews

Hands-On ZigBee: Implementing 802.15.4 with Microcontrollers (Embedded Technology)

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Little more than an overview of the various 802.15.4 / Zigbee chips available from various manufacturers. Very little actual Zigbee information. Lacking any serious example source-code. Also the author has possibly the most annoying writing style I've ever read, with lots of music trivia filling the places where real information should be.

While at first I thought that I'd like this book due to the author's odd writing style I quickly grew annoyed by it since he really did skip over a lot of information. Ealy seems completely incapable of conveying technical information in his writing. He jumps from silly completely unrelated topics to hardly explained C struct definitions to other parts that rely on what he should have been telling when he was telling some story. Then he just goes on to tell about several radio chipsets and their included software packages. It really isn't much more than you'd get in an evaluation package from the manufacturers, which may be of some use as for hobbyist these may be difficult to evaluate, but he still doesn't give you enough to make any determination about what package you'd like to use.
The included CD is pretty useless. It has packages from some of the chip development packages (that you can't use without those packages) and an ARP project that he had left over from his ethernet book as he never mentioned using ARP in relation to Zigbee and 802.15.4, and hardly said anything about Zigbee though he used the word a lot.

This book has some helpful information about ZigBee technology, and it's clear the author is quite knowledgeable about his topic. It is also very clear that the author has a terrific sense of humor, mixing in his homespun, tongue-in-cheek wit with the technical verbiage. This, however, was a distraction, in my opinion.

It is fully understandable to see the need to take what some might call a dry topic and try to make it more interesting. If this were a book about home remedies or training your dog, humor would certainly have been more appropriate. For an engineer like myself, however, who is wanting to understand the technology better, this is not necessarily a dry topic, and attempts to lighten it, at least for me, made it a little more difficult to read.

As far as the technical portion of the book, I learned quite a lot about ZigBee (more than I'll ever need to know), and I congratulate the author for his vast knowledge. The humor will certainly work well for some readers, but I think not for all.

Why quote one of the chapters as the title for my review you ask? Well, this illustrates exactly the problem with ZigBee and in fact all wireless systems on the market these days. The amount of abbreviations and new definitions is almost overwhelming. Fred Eady has written a masterpiece where he not only takes us near the bottom, but he guides us up to the surface too. The information is easy digestible, even for a novice to ZigBee. The book clearly delivers what is advertises on the cover; it's hands-on ZigBee. All the products of every ZigBee manufacturer is scrutinized. The book suits the engineer who needs to select a platform to build their application on. A excellent way to start.

When you have absolutely no knowledge of ZigBee and need to know more about the basics of 802.15.4, I suggest reading the 2nd edition of IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (SP1150) first.

The Short version " Blinkin Awsome"

The Long version "Exactly what you would expect from Fred Eady.

Great examples and he shows no bias he tests and configures all the modules..

On ya Fred.