Hello,
I am 73 years old, I am retired after having been a self-made programmer for a good part of my industrial life. I have a good knowledge of electronics, but they date back to 30 years. In short, I still have the desire to learn and I decided to get into DIY using Arduino boards.
So I ordered 2 books from Elektor written by Warwick A. Smith: one on the Arduino Uno hardware, the other almost identical on the Mega2560.
When I learn something from a book written in English, I always make a Word file translated into French.
I have almost finished the reading and therefore the translation of the 1st book on the Arduino Uno, and I must say that I am a little disappointed.
Usually, Anglo-Saxon books are much more didactic than books written by French people, but there, in places one might think that this book is aimed at kindergarten kids.
The author seems to be obsessed with resistors and it takes up several pages in the book to protect the LEDs!
The Arduino world is an `Open-Source` world rather made for tinkerers who do not want to spend too much on material but rather on gray matter.
The author describes the `official` Arduino hardware in great details, but does not give any details on those made by third-party manufacturers, which whatever he says works fine.
He doesn`t even mention the competitor circuit of the ATmega16U2, which is the CH340G with a specific driver that works very well.
He reviews on many pages the use of the Atmel-ICE programmer which is still worth around 150 euros, but he does not even mention the USBASP which is open source, and which works with programmers ` Chinese `which cost a few euros.
Finally it gives some examples of use of components, integrated circuits, memories, which are all obsolete if we refers to `Mouser electronics`
In short, there is a lot of information in this book, but it is ultimately a bit `messy`.
I do not think that I will read and translate the book on the Arduino Mega2560, because there is much more practical advices in French on the Web than in these books.
I don`t regret to have purchased these books, I`m just a little disappointed.
