This book is ideal for the engineer, technician, hobbyist and student who have knowledge of the basic principles of PIC microcontrollers and want to develop more advanced applications using the 18F series.
The architecture of the PIC 18FXXX series as well as typical oscillator, reset, memory, and input-output circuits is completely detailed. After giving an introduction to programming in C, the book describes the project development cycle in full, giving details of the process of editing, compilation, error handling, programming and the use of specific development tools. The bulk of the book gives full details of tried and tested hands-on projects, such as the 12C BUS, USB BUS, CAN BUS, SPI BUS and real-time operating systems.

* A clear introduction to the PIC 18FXXX microcontroller's architecture
* 20 projects, including developing wireless and sensor network applications, using I2C BUS, USB BUS, CAN BUS and the SPI BUS, which give the block and circuit diagram, program description in PDL, program listing and program description.
* Numerous examples of using developmental tools: simulators, in-circuit debuggers (especially ICD2) and emulators
* A CDROM of all the programs, hex listings, diagrams, data sheets and tables

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

Broad coverage, well-written, but maybe not worthy of the title "advanced" - 2008-11-29
Reviewer Rating:

This book is well-written and is of the "something for everybody" variety.

Actually as I review the contents of the book, I realize how much ground was covered. There are a lot topics in this book that are directly on-target for a lot of practicing engineers.

As an example, in the last 12 months (before having this book at my fingertips, actually), I implemented USB, SD card functionality, CAN and an RTOS. All of these topics, and more, are covered in this single book.

I will say that the material is not covered in depth, and does seem to betray the "advanced" moniker in the title. The other ding on the book is that it is heavily geared towards the mikroC compiler, which is not very well-known or respected in the PIC community.

Chapter 1 covers the requisite "introduction to computers & microcontrollers" topics, such as number systems, memories, etc.. This will be review / skippable for most readers, but it's good that the author included it.

Chapter 2 is a good survey of the PIC18F. Sure, most of the information is in the datasheets, but here in the book it's digested/summarized, and in some cases, in my opinion, explained better than the Microchip documentation. Worth the read.

Chapter 3 covers the C programming language. I glossed over this chapter, since I've been using C for more than half of my life.

Chapters 4 and 5 cover the mikroC compiler, which is included with the book (limited version), as well as the libraries, development toolset & some sample code. Worth some time, especially if you're new to the toolset. If the author hadn't used this toolset, these chapters wouldn't be as necessary.

Chapter 6 starts with some simple projects. Blinking LEDs, serial communications, basic electronics.... well done but experienced readers will breeze through the material. "Advanced" does not apply to this chapter (its title says as much - "Simple PIC18 projects")

Chapter 7 is more advanced & covers the hardware & firmware aspects of implementing SD-card functionality on an embedded system. There is enough non-PIC-specific information to make this chapter alone worthwhile to anyone implementing SD, even with another microcontroller family. It discusses the SPI interface to the card and card read/write operations (using the mikroC toolset however.) I wish the author had developed more "bare-metal" code, however, as opposed to relying on mikroC libraries.

Chapter 8 covers USB. Again, the material is broad and will be useful to many people, even those not implementing USB with a PIC as is done in the book.

Chapter 9 covers CAN, which is becoming more & more prevalent. Not a substitute for reading the actual CAN specifications, but a very good survey of the topic. What I like about the book, in many of the chapters, simple schematics are provided. These schematics help bring the reader all the way down to the hardware in a gentle way. It's very important to understand this level of detail when developing an embedded sysem, and the author has clearly kept this in mind.

Chapter 10 discusses multi-tasking, RTOSs, state machines and a specific kernel from CCS. Most of the concepts are general & broad enough that they apply regardless of the reader's choice of kernel. A simple multitasking example ties everything together at the end of the book.

Altogether, a solid effort, aimed at beginner to junior embedded staff. The book's language is clear, the drawings are plentiful and the included development tools are enough to begin working & tinkering right away.

Just beware - if you're comfortable with a scope & the PIC family, there is not a lot of PIC material or code that will be entirely new to you. You might pick up some knowledge on USB, CAN, multi-tasking, etc... however.

Bad Book - 2008-07-28
Reviewer Rating:
Not only the MikroC is not work. Even different chapter uses different compiler. For USB uses PICBasic and RTOS uses CCS and the other uses MikroC. What happens the author just spend time at copy and paste. Almost the 2/3 of the books is the general purpose information and just useful for the beginning student. I am very disappointed at this book.

Great book, wrong title - 2009-08-10
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book for those begining programming PIC MCUs. Some might argue that the content is not for advanced users, but this book helped me create some advanced projects later on. Don't judge a book by its cover and in this case don't judge the book by it's title. The book contains great material which will jump-start you in building your own PIC projects. I found the chapters on USB to be extremely usefull and I have to give cretid to this book for being able to build my own USB gamepad device (google for "starlino gamepad" and see the project for yourself) !

Only a remote relationship to "C' - 2009-05-05
Reviewer Rating:
I would be embarrassed to title this book as an Advanced work of anything, much less an advanced work featuring the C programming language. This book has the same relationship to ANSI C that a bull has to agriculture. The only positive statement I can make is that the book plagiarizes much of it's content from Microchip. That alone is worthwhile. Shame on both the publisher and the author for inferring these are C projects... If you're a serious programmer, don't pollute your system with this.

Great Book - 2008-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
This is a very useful addition to any PIC programmer's library. In particular it fills the gap between the mikroC manual and getting into some real working projects. The projects are practical and useful and the writing style coax's the reader through an effective and structured learning process. Given that C is industry standard this text would be very useful to anyone converting from Assembler or Basic.
Highly Recomended

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