The best books of PIC Microcontrollers Programming in C

    C Programming for Microcontrollers Featuring 

ATMEL’s AVR Butterfly and the free WinAVR Compiler 

C Programming for Microcontrollers Featuring ATMEL’s AVR Butterfly and the free WinAVR Compiler

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This a fun book that is great for people that want to get started in embedded programming and design. And at a low introductory affordable price.

This book, and the AVR Butterfly (~$20 at Digikey) are the best bargain you can get for getting started in Embedded programming and development. Together (the book, the AVR Butterfly and miscellaneous parts) form a complete development kit. AVR must be selling the kit for a loss to introduce their products. Buy it before they change their minds.

Although this is not a professional development kit, you will be able to do a lot. This is more like a cookbook to introduce you to the concepts and to enable to easily put a project together.

After reading through this and putting together the projects you will have the basics to understand more advanced books and enable you to design more advanced projects.

The one basic I thought the author left out that was important to include, was the C programming type qualifier “volatile”. Volatile before a variable tells the compiler that a variable can have its value altered by agencies other than the program. For example you would use this when you are reading from a hardware address that is set by an interface. Otherwise the compiler may optimize the variable as a constant and not actually read the value from the hardware address on repeat iterations.

Code example: volatile int temp; Reads an 8 bit temperature code from a hadware address interfaced to a thermocouple.

So now you have it.

I found the book to be very readable, easy to understand and fun to read through.

As prerequisites for this I would recommend:

* Familiarity with the C programming language. For beginners:

I recommend the book “Practical C Programming”. There are

many fine books to choose from.

* Knowledge of very basic circuits, and how to solder

wires.

* A very light knowledge of microprocessors. For

beginners: I recommend the book “Programming Embedded

Systems in C and C++”, by Michael Barr. There are a few

other good beginner books to choose from.

For the beginner, this is a must have that will enable you to quickly get started and build introductory projects. If you are new to embedded programming and design I would highly recommend getting this book and the AVR butterfly.

 Programming 16-Bit PIC Microcontrollers in C, Second Edition: Learning to Fly the PIC 24

Programming 16-Bit PIC Microcontrollers in C, Second Edition: Learning to Fly the PIC 24

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I just bought this book and managed to read through it over a few days. I must say that I’m very impressed by it! The book covers programming the PIC24 in C using MPLAB’s C30 C compiler. It covers the PIC24 architecture and peripherals in as much detail as required by a C programmer as well as various non-ANSI C PIC24 specific addons available in the C30 compiler. It also includes a myriad of cool interfacing projects with minimal additional hardware (SPI EEPROM , 3 resistors for the video example flash card, PS2 interfacing e.t.c.) Finally it also introduces all the debugging tools available in MPLAB such as the simulator/logic analyzer and stimulus generator. This book is not for the absolute microcontroller / programming in C beginner however. Its target audience is embedded systems programmers considering to switch to Microchip’s PIC24 family and EE students/hobbyists with some background in embedded systems/ microcontrollers / C programming.

Microcontrollers: From Assembly Language to C Using the PIC24 Family

Microcontrollers: From Assembly Language to C Using the PIC24 Family

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As a student of computer and control systems engineering, I am constantly looking for good books based on microcontrollers and electronics. Most of the books that I have seen, up to this point, have neglected to mention several important components regarding either the software or hardware portions of microcontrollers causing me to find another book to supplement the previous book. In all, I wind up having to use 5 or 6 different books to get a full understanding of the microcontroller theory and operation.

However, I recently came across the “Microcontrollers From Assembly to C Using the PIC24 Family” by Professors Robert Reece, J.W. Bruce, and Bryan Jones. This book encompasses all of what 6 books did for me. I certainly wished that I had came across this book first!

The one thing that really struck the home run for me on this book was that it has/uses excellent examples. It details what each instruction does and literally points out what its function is — and it does this in both C and assembly! And if that is not enough, it compares the C code to the assembly instruction. VERY IMPRESSIVE.

The explanations of how microcontrollers work, specifically the PIC24 family, is such that a person with little to no experience can easily grasp the concepts. This book is also a fantastic reference for the more experienced microcontroller users. I personally have worked with the Atmel 8051 and Cypress’ PSoC. I got this book because I wanted to expand my knowledge of embedded systems.

Whether you are a hobbyist, or a student dealing with microcontrollers, or an expert in the field, this book is a great tool to have regarding the understanding of the PIC24 microcontroller. I am very pleased. Thank you professors Reese, Bruce, and Jones for doing such a great job!