Customer Reviews

Parallel Port Complete: Programming, Interfacing, & Using the PC's Parallel Printer Port

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a very good book for those interested in controlling the parallel port interface on the PC. The most common usage is for cheap/inexpensive data acquisition or control, but the book also covers "LapLink" type transfers, high speed printing and device chaining. In my opinion, this books greatest strength is that all of the code is provided in Visual Basic, Delphi and C. Visual Basic and Win95/WinNT cannot directly control the printer port, so the authors have made a library of routines for use with any language, thus filling a hole that exists in Visual Basic. Anyone who wants to directly control the parallel port from Visual Basic will find everything they need (both on disk and in instruction) in this book.

Do not purchase the e-book version of this book.
The e-book version is over protected, Over priced and almost completely usless.
You Cannot print or copy and past the example code for use in your own programs. You do not get the Code disk with this either.
Neither can you copy the e-book to another computer or, as I was wanting, to a PDA. (The e-book is encripted)
Do Not waste your money on the e-book version of this book!
You will be better off with the Hard copy + Code disk.

For many people involved in a project to connect something to a PC parallel port this book will be the only one needed. It contains detailed information about almost all aspects of parallel port interfacing for PC systems.

The author covers the port from the nitty gritty of designing and building custom hardware to connect to the parallel port to the higher level protocols such as the IEEE standard for daisy chain negotiation on the port.

The book covers all of the different modes of operation including ECP and EPP as well as the original parallel port and the PS/2 or bidirectional port.

As well as the descriptions of these aspects of the parallel port the book includes a disk with code to access and drive the port from Windows Visual Basic programs.

The book is aimed squarely at the PC & Windows world but it is applicable outside that environment. Many systems now include parallel ports that are register compatible with the PC parallel port from a programming point of view. More that that, the protocols that operate between the computer and the peripheral are standard and so something like the daisy chain protocol is relevant to any architecture that wants to use it.

My only criticism is the way in which some information is presented. It's not that anything is left out, but by way of an example, the IEEE standard document is a more readable description of the daisy chain protocol than this book.

This is a very good book for VB programmers who need to do communication programming over the parallel port. It includes a disk with a custom dll for accessing the port with several great examples and techniques of writing a communication program to be used by the parallel port. This book will be a great help to VB programmers who don't want to write C code to access the parallel port.

Axelson's book conducts you through the intricacies of accessing your PC parallel port from Visual Basic. It covers the all-important hardware details of each variation of parallel port, so that you can understand what may (and may not) be done using them. Sufficient example programs are included to illustrate each topic. Also included are the 16-bit and 32-bit DLLs required to access the parallel port I/O registers

i found this book to be of great use. it is fairly well written, comes with software and lots of sample circuit schematics for building things.

there dont appear to be that many books on this subject available (last time i looked on amazon i got 6 results) and i was pleased to find that this book provided me with the information i required to complete certain projects. household automation and a security system being among them.

i have to admit that the visual basic code is a bit long winded, and am left asking the question, why not just use assembly language (3 lines of code required to write to or read from a port, as opposed to dozens of lines of code to do it with visual basic). though i guess most people dont have time to go and learn how to program in assembler before hand. but if your reading this and have considered maybe learning assembly language, i urge you to do so. its not neally as hard as people say, just takes some getting used to and some patience. a good beginner assembly language book is Kip R. Irvine's "assembly language for intel based computers". and a more advanced one which i hold in high regard is "The 80x86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers (Volumes I & II) Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing". NOTE: assembly language is really the only way to go for real time control.

overall im very happy i bought this book and would recommend it to anyone wanting this information, unless they were intending to do something with an nt based operating system, in which case this book is useless to them, beyond explaining how the parallel port works, and for the example circuits.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for the home gageteer. The author Jan Axelson is a rare example of someone that knows her stuff, explains it well to novices, and provides excellent generic examples of code. The examples provided cover situations such as; exporting data bits out thru the parallel port, reading info from the data port, searching for data ports and addresses, and using the parallel port to communicate pc to pc. Seldom do you find a "can-do" person that provides excellent instruction at a beginner's level. The fascination of this book is that as home computers become more powerful, they are still limited in their effect on the external environment, except through dedicated peripherals, such as printers, scanners, etc. With this book, a pc port relay kit (purchased off the internet), and maybe a semester of Visual Basic instruction and " you da man ". Once you can open and close a relay connected to your parallel port from a visual basic program you are off and running. Most electrical devices in you home become fair game. This book needs an update, except for a Tour-de Force in the beginning chapters of code segments in Pascal, Assembler And Quick-Basic, the remainder of the book is in Visual basic 4.0. This reader had no problem importing the examples provided on the enclosed floppy disk into Visual Basic 5.0 . This author has also written a sister book "The Complete Serial Port ", and it is on my "must read " list.

There's a pretty thorough overview of all sorts of PC parallel ports and their use for non-trivial interfacing (other that the printers, that is.) An enormous drawback of this book is that all code is in Visual Basic. That is as revolting as Knuth's use of his imaginary MIX assembly in his algorightms books. Hard to justify, especially for such a hardware-specific area of programming. Otherwise the book is very helpful.

This book has it all. It has to be one of the only good books on the subject. If you look on the web for information on parallel port control, it will probably refer to her book. Her website is a source of tons of information, and is a great addition to the book. A warning however; if you are not familair with computers, or visual basic programming, then this is not the book for you. You really need to have an understanding at the bit level. I highly recommend it.

I suppose the best comment I can make is that I went from not knowing anything about the parallel port, to creating a successful and fairly fast interface between a PC and an FPGA core (that I also created) using nothing but this book. I use this core circuit now to interface to my hardware designs at work, and quickly develop and modify GUI interfaces in Visual Basic. I can download multi-megabit configuration files to my circuits in about 10 seconds via my parallel port implementation. The LabView folks with their custom DIO cards and kludgey software updating are all green with envy. ;-)

So, if this book can get this Mac-head developing parallel port interfaces to custom hardware under Windows NT within a span of three weeks, it's got to be pretty good!