> Just a word to the wise -- learning about microcontrollers is a
> multi-tiered thing, when coming from the world of PCs and C. You may
> want to consider starting about by staying in C, and learning about
> the hardware subsystems (A/D, I/O, timers, etc.) of the chips. Once
> you've mastered that, then jump into assembly. But you may find that
> it's really not all that necessary to learn assembly ...
>
> Don't get me wrong, I've written assembly for 15+ years, and I think
> it's an essential part of a programmer's toolkit. But C will get you
> 95% of the way there, even with PICs (some will disagree).

I've written in assembly language for 30 years now. I still write in
assembly language for some projects, but most of my embedded programming is
in C these days.

My current project uses a PIC16F877 and I used the Hi-Tech C compiler.
Easiest time I ever had with an embedded system. There isn't the first line
of assembly language in it, and yes it uses interrupts.

This is a commercial product and the first production run of 500 ships to a
single customer in less than 2 weeks. (International no less!)

I like assembly language, but it is not as required as it once was.
Understanding the chip and the subsystems is the tricky part if you really
are a C expert, but then it took about 10 years and 3 million lines of code
for me to become a real C expert. It is not always easy to outwit the
optimizer.

Wynn Rostek

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