SD Card Projects Using the PIC Microcontroller

When you look at this book, your probably thinking this will be a great book for using microcontroller and SD card. Since the title uses project, you are also probably thinking there are going to be lots of neat projects to learn with. Well that is not the case. When I first started reading the book, I was excited about getting to the first microcontroller/ sd project. But it seemed like im reading, reading, reading and not really learning anything about SD/microcontrollers. it seems like the first long seven chapters is introductory course. The first portion of the book is spent teaching you how to convert binary to hex, hex to binary, etc. Then it seems to go into a brief introduction course in C. Then your learning about developments boards, and it just drags and drags and drags, where are the project with the SD cards? Seems like im just reading a bunch of stuff I learned in an intro to pic course, but if you are looking into creating projects with microcontroller and sd cards, you should already have a graps on programming microcontrollers. So the book is really more of an intro to pic microcontroller than it is about programming pics in conjuctions with SD cards.Finally I get to Chapter 8, hoping that I may get to first project. Well Chapter 8 was just a chapter on functions and procedure, important but no projects yet.Chapter 9 (page 413) The last chapter in the Book, there has to be something good here. There has to be a project. Guess what there is. My first microcontroller/SD project and its title "Project to write a short text file to an SD" Chapter 9 has 14 small projects. And then the book ends.Ok so to summarized it:The first 7 chapters are useless (thats all stuff covered in an intro course, im okay with a brief review, but 7 chapter of a 9 chapter book is a bit too much)Only last two chapters are usefull in this book. The first projects starts on chapter 9, and it there are only 14 small projects.Then the book ends. One more thing, there are a few errors in the book, I search for an errata and none.I have found more useful information and better projects to learn from on someones homemade "how to" website than I did from this book.NOT WORTH IT.

Overall this is a great book that explains how to read and write to an SD card using the Microchip Memory card library. My only disappointment was that their was not much in the coverage of raw reads and writes to the SD card (Not everybody wants to use the FAT file system).The actual SD card content of the book was slightly less than half, the remainder of the book introduces you to the ins and out of PIC 18F programming. While this is good and I even learned a couple of things, the book could have devoted more coverage to the actual SD card projects that it purports to cover.If you want a good book that teaches you the Microchip library then this is the one for you even though it leaves out a few things that I would like to have seen covered (I.E. File Seek and more advanced file operations).IMHO, I do not care about how to make a LED dice roller or some of the other beginner projects that this book covers. If you are a beginner or even intermediate designer, the basic projects are OK but if you just wanted to learn about how to use an SD card then those projects are a waste of time and this book may not be the one for you.

I'm about half way through the book, a lot of programming basics but I'm a beginner at C so I don't mind that. He does a good job of explaining so I understand. I'm to the point where it's time to actually start entering some code so I decided I should go to the "Companion" website, guess what? It no longer exists! The copyright on the book is 2010 and they have already taken the companion site down. I am very unhappy, I thought that was part of what I was buying. I feel cheated. I'll get through without the companion website but I feel I deserve a partial refund from the publisher or Author. Amazon provided excellent service as always. Love my Prime membership and 1 click ordering.In the future I'll purchase from another Publisher and Author when possible.

This book is OK and I would still recommend it if you wanted to get more out of your sd card. But there is lots about programming other parts of an embedded system also - UART for example. What was also a bit dissapointing was all projects used the MPLAB compiler from microchip. In his previous book he has used the compiler from MiKroelektronika (MiKroC for PIC). which I have purchased and consequently I got alot more out of reading his other books.

Purchased this and author's earlier book together. Both had interesting content in part, but there is a tremendous lot or repeats and word-for-word duplication.Good coverage of SPI interface and interesting projects. Most of the first few chapters is way too elementary for anyone who is going to be programming this type of projects.Figure 7-3 is an obvious error, as it is a duplicate of 7-2 instead of what it is supposed to be.

This book provides the background and introduction information that beginners need to get started with PIC Microcontrollers and the development tools available form Microchip. It was published in 2010 and things have moved on but the basics never change.If you are willing to search the internet & book libraries you could probably find all this information yourself. but having it in one place, logically organised and indexed is worth the dollars.

I bought this book because I wanted to build a data logger for a project I am working on. I have to say that it is probably one of the best instructional books that I have ever read. It is good to have a knowledge of some intermediate programming in the C language to understand the book. All of the sample projects Run with no problems as long as you follow the instructions in the book. I would reccomend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to program a PIC Microcontroller to read and write to an SD card.

A good portion of the book (50%) was about the basics of PIC's and programming in general, not SD cards. 3 stars only because it did have some SD card info.

Good starting point with PIC18F embedded systems developing. Very good explanations of PIC18F MCU configurations and C18 programming languages. Unfortunately link to to promised acompanied software does not work and you must find some other sources or all this good stuff becomes useless :(