Rating: 
Summary: Excellent information!
Review: There are two must have books on the subject of serial communications - this book and Richard Grier's "Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications". Buy both books for your reference library. This book helped me in developing a Human Machine Interface (HMI) application with communications to serial devices. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth it
Review: This book is quite disappointing. It's coverage is both narrow and shallow. If you're after some code to do serial programming from Visual Basic it's probably ok, but any different or deeper than that, you're better off with what you'll find on Google.
Rating: 
Summary: A good source of info, but not for the beginner
Review: This book is very complete indeed, but it assumes you already know a fair bit about electronic circuitry. As a computer programmer with little electronics experience, I first had to read up on basic electronics. Also, some sections could have been easier to understand if there was more supporting details or examples. However, the book did answer most of my questions about the serail port and I was able to complete my programming project on time. I would rate this book a 3.5 to 4.0
Rating:
Summary: A good source of info, but not for the beginner
Review: This book is very complete indeed, but it assumes you already know a fair bit about electronic circuitry. As a computer programmer with little electronics experience, I first had to read up on basic electronics. Also, some sections could have been easier to understand if there was more supporting details or examples. However, the book did answer most of my questions about the serail port and I was able to complete my programming project on time. I would rate this book a 3.5 to 4.0
Rating: 
Summary: Nice intro to hardware, poor software coverage
Review: This is a nice book if you want a basic introduction to the serial port from a hardware/circuits point of view. Primary coverage is on the RS232 and RS485, but there is information relevant to other serial standards as well. There is also information for serial communications using microcontrollers such as the 8052 and Basic Stamp; surprisingly NONE of the popular Motorola series (mc68hc11, hc12, hc16, etc) are covered. The glaring weakness of the book is the software coverage, which uses Visual Basic. Why use such an arcane and limited language? Very few engineers and techies use VB, so the majority of the intended audience will miss out on about half of the book. This is a shame since reading code for serial programming gives tremendous insight into what is really happening. This book would be useful to many more people had it been written in a standard language such as C or Java or even assembly.
Rating:
Summary: A Complete Reference
Review: This is a superb book to help you interface a hardware device that you built, to the PC's serial port. But it is much more than that. It also shows how to network multiple computers using the serial port (hence creating your own network!). In addition, it also has details on how to interface some microcontroller based designs to the serial port as well. The author does focus on Visual Basic to access the ports but gives clear pointers as to how to use other methods to access the serial port ( including C ). The disk even has dll's you can use for direct port access even though this is forbidden under WinNT/2000, unless you use the function CreateFile(). All and all, I thought I got more for my money than I could've hoped for. Thank you Jan Axelson!
Rating:
Summary: an excellent book, must read!
Review: well, i was doing a project that required some very simple interface with a serial device, this book was the only book i brought and it coved more than enough material to make my project work. about the VB code, well, what i can say, I was using VB..... well, the book had a very in depth cover of the hardware and the standard of the rs232c. If you want to know how the electronics works, this is the book for you. if you just want some quick and dirty tricks to make the connection work, this book will also do. as i said early, it had VB examples. in 15 minutes, you will know the basics, and programing in no time!
Rating:
Summary: This book is mostly fluff
Review: What do you expect from an author who admits in print that her favorite language is BASIC? I found more useful information after an hour's search of the web than can be extracted from this painful text. As far as I can tell, this book was about 10 pages long before the Visual Basic listings and irrelevant information about various microcontrollers was added. Save your money.
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