Customer Reviews

The Windows Serial Port Programming Handbook

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

 

 

This book offers a very good and exceptionally practical explanation of how to program PC serial ports. In my job, I have to write interfaces to serial devices, and this book gives me the information I need to make quick work of things no matter what language I am using. Within 2 hours I was able to have a running Visual C++ application reading and writing to a device connected to my COM port. The book goes beyond general concepts,with lots of sample code and detailed line-by-line instruction.
I recommend this book to the student who desires a complete understanding of serial ports, and to the engineer who needs to come rapidly up to speed on how to make use of serial ports in his applications.
The section regarding the hardware aspects of serial ports provides a good basis of understanding the terminology, and is particularly helpful in understanding all the different protocols that are out there. Also helpful was the explanation of the Windows API functions necessary for serial communication. The author also anticipates problems that may arise along the way and suggests ways to avoid them.

This book allows you to quickly learn how to setup serial port communication in your code so you can read and write bytes on serial port.

However they don't really give you many examples of how to write real world code to interface with serial devices. So if you think this book will help you write the code to communicate with some kind of serial device think again. The book will only give you the foundation for reading and writing serial ports in different programming languages and operating systems. The section on Windows C++ (protected mode) is very limited and most of the information can be found on MSDN.

The most complicated part of serial programming is the two way communication. They only show examples of single threaded code and a Sputnik's sized blip on OVERLAPPED I\O. Overlapped IO is very important if you need real time two way serial communication where you are reading and writing at the same time your program is performing other tasks. Because you dont always want to block your thread on reads and writes.

This book is one of the only book out there that targets serial communication. Overall the book is good and covers a history of serial devices, how to establish communication, and reading\writing bytes on the port. The examples in the book are clear however they lack what I would consider real world application.

This book tries to cover a large amount of material, and as a result, it only touches on the basics. I was interested in the section on programming serial ports in visual C++ for a windows XP machine. The coverage amounted to 20 pages with no in depth discussion of problems that that might be encountered, and how to troubleshoot them. The book did allow me to do a little bit with serial port communications, but only enough to get me into trouble. I'm still looking for a book that explains how to do this in visual C++ on a Win XP machine. I give it two stars because it is well written, and it does allow the reader to begin to use the serial port.

I'm a hardware person who have been dealing with RF devices for almost 10 years. Recently I was commissioned to make a MFC based Visual C++ code to open and communicate the serial port based liquid crystal filter. Since I was not a computer science student, this was really beyond what I expect. After I bought this book with Ivor Horton's Visual C++ 2008, my work was like..'a morning coffee.' It has the line to line explanations, old C++ to VC++ conversions...etc. If you need different language like MATLAB, VB, Labview, it will cover them, too.

Some people said this book's example is so specific to follow; I don't think so. If you need to open serial port with VC++, that would mean you also have to make some hardware devices or analyze the hardware stuff by yourself.
Even if I didn't use the example provided by this book, this book gave me the enough example how to test the serial port communication. You can apply this to your own work.

For testing or making some serial devices, you basically need a multimeter, female or male serial ports, some cables..etc.

Also, you may have to configure your computer's bios setup.
Don't miss the CD on the back cover.

I am a graduate student who has a lot of interest on this field. I was searching for a good reference for my research and found this book. This book contains a lot of details so that even beginners can easily follow. Not only the book is helpful but also the Author is so helpful. I have contacted him by email regarding my question on the book, actually without expecting any response. But he has replied my email many times with great answer, suggestion, and following-up. People like him should really be acknowledged.