Hi Folks,

I got a copy of Jan Axelson's "Serial Port Complete" a few days ago and I
thought I'd put in a quick plug for it.  It has a lot of useful information
that seems to come up as questions on the lists every few weeks.


In the book, Jan introduces asynchronous communications in the PC (ie the
Serial ports) along with the hardware (8250 port) and RS-232 electrical
standards.  She also provides hardware level translators and Basic Stamp
code and interfaces.  The RS-232 information is complete and informative and
is a lot more useful than my primary reference, "RS-232 Made Easy".

Where this book really shines is in the 100 pages explaining RS-485
providing sample circuits and some sample applications (including creating a
PC/BS-2 network).  This is the best RS-485 reference and tutorial I've seen.

All the code is written in Visual BASIC, with all the source code and .DLLs
on an accompanying diskette.

This book does not have all the information needed to hook up a PICMicro (or
any microcontroller other than the BASIC-52 or Basic Stamps), but it does
have all the information needed to connect a CMOS microcontroller to an
RS-232 device or RS-485 network.

Highly recommended.


Jan's web site is:

http://www.lvr.com

and you can get more information and order it there.


It has not yet shown up on Amazon.com, when it does, I will add it to my
"Book Room" at:

http://www.myke.com/Book_Room/book4.htm

which is the "Electrical Engineering and Electronics" page.


myke

This week in myke's Book Room: "The Night Crew" by John Sandford

http://www.myke.com/Book_Room