Customer Reviews

PC PhD: Inside PC Interfacing

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

 

 

The author obviously knows his stuff. The book is chock full of useful information, and not a lot of fluff. It's hard to compress the important facts of PC interfacing into just over 900 pages -- including a hefty appendix. The author manages to do a good job, without dumbing it down for the beginners or making it too lofty for the rest of us.

However, the book suffers from poor language throughout, enough that it often gets in the way of the message. I understand that there were some problems with the editing staff at McGraw-Hill before the book went to press, and perhaps that is the reason for the language difficulties. While one can normally overlook typos, grammar, spelling, usage and sentence structure in a strictly technical volume, it's difficult to do so with this book. Sometimes the English is downright hard to read. Had it been better edited, it would merit five stars and not three.

Based solely on the strength of the author's knowledge and the information presented in this book, I would purchase other books by the author.

The PC Ph.D. is one of the most authoritative and comprehensive books about the PC Architecture available. The book provides a good coverage of not only PC Hardware but it also contains a through survey of the available software development environments across multiple operating systems. I particularly enjoyed the History of the PC Section. The PC's evolution is truly interesting. Predko's liberal use of hardware and software projects provides a solid set of examples for the reader to learn from. I found the book to be valuable resource while developing an ISA Interface card and I'm sure you will too.

I picked this book up from a local Chapters because I was looking for something to help me out at work (I repair PCs). Wow, this book is thick and has a ton of information on understandin just what is going on inside the PC. Included on the CD-ROM are a couple of utilities that I have used to help me understand what is going wrong with PCs and what is and what isn't being installed.

The history of the PC was really useful and it helped me to understand what was going on - especially when I get an old '486.

This book is NOT everything you need to interface your PC with outside devices. Like most of Myke Predko's books it is full of filler material and misrepresented. It does contain lots of interesting information about computer interfacing, but no useful information to get you started on your own. I am very dissapointed with Predko's books and feel that he writes to sell books and not primarily to educate and inform.

I bought this book because I liked Mykes "Programming and Customizing PICmicro Microcontrollers" and I was happy to see that it is different from the other ones, like "The Indispensable PC Hardware" book.

In Mykes book, he explains what is happening in the PC and what you can do to take advantage of it. This difference makes the book a lot more useful.

There are a number of example circuits and programs that you can use with the book to help you understand how the PC works and give you a start on developing your own applications.

Great book from a great Canadian author.

If you want to learn about how PCs work, and especially how they access external devices, this ambitious book covers it all. There are even descriptions of basic projects the author has built and experimented with, including a parallel-port dongle and a toy crane controlled by the serial port. The writing style is clear and conversational.