ThermalRunaway
New Member
Book Review:
Title: Visual BASIC for Electronics Engineering Applications
Author: Vincent Himpe
ISBN-13: 978-0-905705-68-2
ISBN-10: 0-905705-68-8
Supplier: Elektor Electronics
Category:
PC Application writing for Electronics interfacing and control.
Introduction:
I could hardly control my excitement when this book came through the post. For the Electronics Hobbyist or Professional Designer it offers the opportunity to take your projects into a completely new world with PC control via your own GUI (or command-line) driven applications.
My Review:
This book covers Visual BASIC programming for all the latest versions of the development environment including 5.0, 6.0, VBA, .net and 2005 so no matter which you use, this book should give you an excellent footing for the development of Windows applications.
The book is written by an Electronics Engineer, specifically FOR Electronics Engineers and is geared towards our applications of the language. The first half (or perhaps 3/4) of the book covers the Visual BASIC language and assumes no prior knowledge so if you're a complete beginner or maybe you've experience with other languages but not this one, then this is definitely the book for you. It walks you through the language with supporting code made available for each topic to help you with your understanding.
The latter part of the book is most likely to be the most exciting as this is where you will apply your Visual BASIC knowledge to build applications specifically for the control, communications and monitoring of your own Electronics projects. The book covers the following:
* Serial Communications
* Printer Ports
* Bit-Banging
* Protocol Emulation
* ISA
* USB
* Ethernet Interfacing
* Remote Control of test equipment via GPIB (very cool!)
* Communication via TCP/IP and UDP
* Internet Servers
Each of these topics is extensively covered and supplied with supporting code for you to play with and learn from.
*The Bad Bits*
Now that I've covered the good bits that this book has to offer I'm sure that if you're anything like me you're already falling over yourself to obtain a copy of this book. Personally, I would certainly advise you to go ahead and get hold of one but before you go logging on to Elektor Electronics I do have some minor bad points to put forward.
Firstly, and before I start, I want to make something perfectly clear. This is an EXCELLENT book. If you're the least bit interested in building Windows applications to use with your own Electronics projects, then this book is undoubtedly for you. But there are some bad points to consider (two in particular) which I'd like to put forward as part of this review.
Bad Point No.1:
Vincent Himpe should sack his proof reader, because this is probably the worst book I've read in terms of spelling, punctuation, grammer, and the structure of sentances. I think I was cursing over a Japanese-English translated TV Service Manual the last time I read something this bad. Now don't get me wrong, the book isn't so bad that it's unreadable, but there are a lot of spelling mistakes and there were a few occasions where I had to read a paragraph, read it again, and then consider what he was trying to say for a few moments before I could grasp the issue. I suspect that English is not Vincent's first language and if that's the case then you could argue that the book is very WELL written, but I still feel that a good English Translation of the English Translation would be desirable for future editions of the book. In any case, this amounts to only a minor frustration and has little impact upon the content of the book itself.
Bad Point No.2:
I think Vincent has suffered at the hands of a desire to please everybody. He has opted to support numerous versions of Visual BASIC, past and present, and in so doing he has created the opportunity to become occasionally frustrated with the layout of the book. To give an example, I use VB .net2005 and there are quite a few major differences between this and previous versions of VB. Vincent has accomodated this by giving in-depth descriptions of any differences between classic VB and new VB, but the net effect (excuse the pun), goes something like this;
You spend some time trawling through a topic, juggling it all around in your head in order to obtain a clear understanding, and then you turn the page only to find that .net no longer supports the feature you've just read about or does it in a completely different way. You're therefore forced into a position where you have to put your new-found knowledge behind you and try to replace it with the .net version instead. As you can imagine, it leads to some confusion from time to time. I developed a technique whereby I would often scan a few pages ahead to see if there were any significant changes to the topic in the .net version and if there were I would only briefly scan the main explanation and then pay more attension to the .net explanation afterwards. It's not a major issue, more of an occasional frustration.
Conclusion:
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has even the least bit of interest in writing Windows applications and/or controlling your own Electronics projects. The content of the book is excellent, it's interesting, and the book serves as a useful reference once you've finished reading it so it'll prove to be value for money over the long term.
My Rating: 8/10 (I'd give 9 if the proof-reading were improved!)
Title: Visual BASIC for Electronics Engineering Applications
Author: Vincent Himpe
ISBN-13: 978-0-905705-68-2
ISBN-10: 0-905705-68-8
Supplier: Elektor Electronics
Category:
PC Application writing for Electronics interfacing and control.
Introduction:
I could hardly control my excitement when this book came through the post. For the Electronics Hobbyist or Professional Designer it offers the opportunity to take your projects into a completely new world with PC control via your own GUI (or command-line) driven applications.
My Review:
This book covers Visual BASIC programming for all the latest versions of the development environment including 5.0, 6.0, VBA, .net and 2005 so no matter which you use, this book should give you an excellent footing for the development of Windows applications.
The book is written by an Electronics Engineer, specifically FOR Electronics Engineers and is geared towards our applications of the language. The first half (or perhaps 3/4) of the book covers the Visual BASIC language and assumes no prior knowledge so if you're a complete beginner or maybe you've experience with other languages but not this one, then this is definitely the book for you. It walks you through the language with supporting code made available for each topic to help you with your understanding.
The latter part of the book is most likely to be the most exciting as this is where you will apply your Visual BASIC knowledge to build applications specifically for the control, communications and monitoring of your own Electronics projects. The book covers the following:
* Serial Communications
* Printer Ports
* Bit-Banging
* Protocol Emulation
* ISA
* USB
* Ethernet Interfacing
* Remote Control of test equipment via GPIB (very cool!)
* Communication via TCP/IP and UDP
* Internet Servers
Each of these topics is extensively covered and supplied with supporting code for you to play with and learn from.
*The Bad Bits*
Now that I've covered the good bits that this book has to offer I'm sure that if you're anything like me you're already falling over yourself to obtain a copy of this book. Personally, I would certainly advise you to go ahead and get hold of one but before you go logging on to Elektor Electronics I do have some minor bad points to put forward.
Firstly, and before I start, I want to make something perfectly clear. This is an EXCELLENT book. If you're the least bit interested in building Windows applications to use with your own Electronics projects, then this book is undoubtedly for you. But there are some bad points to consider (two in particular) which I'd like to put forward as part of this review.
Bad Point No.1:
Vincent Himpe should sack his proof reader, because this is probably the worst book I've read in terms of spelling, punctuation, grammer, and the structure of sentances. I think I was cursing over a Japanese-English translated TV Service Manual the last time I read something this bad. Now don't get me wrong, the book isn't so bad that it's unreadable, but there are a lot of spelling mistakes and there were a few occasions where I had to read a paragraph, read it again, and then consider what he was trying to say for a few moments before I could grasp the issue. I suspect that English is not Vincent's first language and if that's the case then you could argue that the book is very WELL written, but I still feel that a good English Translation of the English Translation would be desirable for future editions of the book. In any case, this amounts to only a minor frustration and has little impact upon the content of the book itself.
Bad Point No.2:
I think Vincent has suffered at the hands of a desire to please everybody. He has opted to support numerous versions of Visual BASIC, past and present, and in so doing he has created the opportunity to become occasionally frustrated with the layout of the book. To give an example, I use VB .net2005 and there are quite a few major differences between this and previous versions of VB. Vincent has accomodated this by giving in-depth descriptions of any differences between classic VB and new VB, but the net effect (excuse the pun), goes something like this;
You spend some time trawling through a topic, juggling it all around in your head in order to obtain a clear understanding, and then you turn the page only to find that .net no longer supports the feature you've just read about or does it in a completely different way. You're therefore forced into a position where you have to put your new-found knowledge behind you and try to replace it with the .net version instead. As you can imagine, it leads to some confusion from time to time. I developed a technique whereby I would often scan a few pages ahead to see if there were any significant changes to the topic in the .net version and if there were I would only briefly scan the main explanation and then pay more attension to the .net explanation afterwards. It's not a major issue, more of an occasional frustration.
Conclusion:
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has even the least bit of interest in writing Windows applications and/or controlling your own Electronics projects. The content of the book is excellent, it's interesting, and the book serves as a useful reference once you've finished reading it so it'll prove to be value for money over the long term.
My Rating: 8/10 (I'd give 9 if the proof-reading were improved!)
