Arduino is one of those things in my “must get around to using” list. Would you say it was suitable for someone with only a semester or two of electronics experience?
I think you will probably find it easier than you expected.
There’s stuff that has probably gone out of your mind (in my case after ignoring electronics for 25 years) but it comes back. The actual amount of support electronics is actually quite small. Putting a resistor in series with an LED to stop it getting too bright. Another resistor in line with a speaker so that you don’t draw too much current. Inputs could do with pull down resistors when they don’t have a signal. This is not really very complicated stuff.
This evening I was hacking away using my daughter’s electronics kit to provide the components. I had wires to a 7 segment display that I had the Arduino displaying numbers on. After that I started read the voltage value from a potentiometer (volume control knob) connected between ground and 5 volts. I used the Arduino to read the value through one of its Analog inputs and translate it into a value on the display.
Then I connected another output pin to a speaker and played a tone into it which had a frequency that was proportional to the voltage value of the potentiometer. It was all very quick and surprisingly easy to do.
Having 6 analog-to-digital converters on board for inputs as well as 6 pulse width modulators for psuedo-analog output makes a lot of analog style projects a lot easier to do.
Doing this kind of thing in the past was amazingly difficult.
The book has the benefit of being able to be picked up and read from any point. i.e. it is a “cookbook” of recipes to do things.
That has the disadvantage of being a little repetitive in a lot of places but also that important concepts tend to get used before they get introduced and discussed later in the book.
For example you really need to jump to chapter 5 before you can get an explanation of the pins on the board, things you have been using for the previous four chapters of examples without really having a detailed grasp of them.
There are plenty of “hyper links” in the book telling you which chapters to get requisite information but I can’t help feeling that they would be less needed if the book was better organised. It pays to have completed all the tutorials on the Arduino website before trying this book.
Another gripe is that the book often discusses the way things were done with the older Arduino boards before getting on to discussing the newer improved ways of doing it with the newer versions. This seems to me to be completely the wrong way round. The old stuff is really only of historical interest. This is the hazard of being a heavily revised book I guess. There are also little errors like mentioning a deprecation of a feature on one page only to use it in an example on the next.
All that said, there is plenty of useful information in the book and I’ve learned quite a bit from it.
John Hardy Developer 
how is it so far?
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I’m only in a few chapters so far but I think it’s a good book. It get gets into a bit more depth than other Arduino books that I’ve skimmed.
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Arduino is one of those things in my “must get around to using” list. Would you say it was suitable for someone with only a semester or two of electronics experience?
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I think you will probably find it easier than you expected.
There’s stuff that has probably gone out of your mind (in my case after ignoring electronics for 25 years) but it comes back. The actual amount of support electronics is actually quite small. Putting a resistor in series with an LED to stop it getting too bright. Another resistor in line with a speaker so that you don’t draw too much current. Inputs could do with pull down resistors when they don’t have a signal. This is not really very complicated stuff.
This evening I was hacking away using my daughter’s electronics kit to provide the components. I had wires to a 7 segment display that I had the Arduino displaying numbers on. After that I started read the voltage value from a potentiometer (volume control knob) connected between ground and 5 volts. I used the Arduino to read the value through one of its Analog inputs and translate it into a value on the display.
Then I connected another output pin to a speaker and played a tone into it which had a frequency that was proportional to the voltage value of the potentiometer. It was all very quick and surprisingly easy to do.
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Yeah, I always found digital electronics a lot easier than analog.
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Having 6 analog-to-digital converters on board for inputs as well as 6 pulse width modulators for psuedo-analog output makes a lot of analog style projects a lot easier to do.
Doing this kind of thing in the past was amazingly difficult.
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As for the book itself:
It helps if you are already familiar with C-style syntax languages because I don’t think the language introductory chapters are very strong.
If you can already program in Java, JavaScript or C++ or especially C you will be set. This book is not a good introduction to programming.
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John Hardy I have no problems on that count. Thanks for your write-up 🙂
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The book has the benefit of being able to be picked up and read from any point. i.e. it is a “cookbook” of recipes to do things.
That has the disadvantage of being a little repetitive in a lot of places but also that important concepts tend to get used before they get introduced and discussed later in the book.
For example you really need to jump to chapter 5 before you can get an explanation of the pins on the board, things you have been using for the previous four chapters of examples without really having a detailed grasp of them.
There are plenty of “hyper links” in the book telling you which chapters to get requisite information but I can’t help feeling that they would be less needed if the book was better organised. It pays to have completed all the tutorials on the Arduino website before trying this book.
Another gripe is that the book often discusses the way things were done with the older Arduino boards before getting on to discussing the newer improved ways of doing it with the newer versions. This seems to me to be completely the wrong way round. The old stuff is really only of historical interest. This is the hazard of being a heavily revised book I guess. There are also little errors like mentioning a deprecation of a feature on one page only to use it in an example on the next.
All that said, there is plenty of useful information in the book and I’ve learned quite a bit from it.
LikeLike