Massimo Banzi

A decent introduction of the Arduino platform. If you're already familiar with microcontrollers and/or programming, it might feel a little patronizing at times, but I guess the intended target are people who don't really know anything about either before they pick up this book.

It's good that every chapter (except the introductions) contains an actual project that you can complete and that illustrates the particular concept you're learning about, rather than just explaining the theory of the concept.

The introductory chapters on how to set up everything and what everything is are probably too long and drawn out, but that is made up by the very useful reference appendices at the end of the book… (meer)

This is a short book: I read it in a couple of hours. It starts on a whimsical, almost philosophical, note which might be useful for some - but not me. I liked the hand-drawn pictures (much clearer than the murky and grainy photos you sometimes encounter). Despite the lightweight approach though it launches fairly quickly into quite large and indigestible blocks of code. Given the lightweight approach of the book it might have been helpful to have taken a more diagrammatic approach to describing the logic of the code and to have relegated most of the detail to an appendix. With no code reference I was sometimes left puzzling over what a particular bit of code was trying to do.

I would like to have seen a bigger range of ideas introduced: there was no for example mention of the "shields" that can be bought for the Arduino to extend its capabilities into everything from WiFi to temperature sensing. The book will also need updating at some point to touch on the Arduino Mega… (meer)