My wife gave me a copy of  the John Peatman book, "Embedded Design with 
the PIC18F452 Microcontroller" for Xmas.  She said that originally 
thought about just giving me an ice-pick (get it?) but decided the book 
was a better idea.  :-)

I read through it, and thought that a few comments might be helpful if 
someone on the piclist has been thinking about buying it.  It is pretty 
expensive, (around $60, I believe, on Amazon.com), and I don't think 
that I would have bought it on my own.  It does come with a (free) 
circuit-board, which can be used to build a nice little test board.  The 
parts have to be ordered (Digikey sells a parts kit for the board for 
around $56), and the board has to be constructed.  But it has an array 
of instruments that the book uses to explain the different applications 
that the 18F452 can be used for (LCD, temperature sensor, UART port with 
MAX 232, a revolving-pulse-generator, several pushbuttons, etc).  I 
built the board and it works fine, except that Olin's EasyProg 
programmer won't program it.  So I have to use the ICD2 for that.  
Bummer, since I prefer to use the EasyProg.  :-(  Peatman does talk 
about some other programmers, but I get the distinct impression that he 
prefers the ICD2.  So if a student has to buy  the book, the ICD2, and 
the parts kit, he or she is going spend quite a few bucks.  (In all 
fairness, there is provision made for using a cheap programmer, using a 
bootloader that he has developed and which can be downloaded).

The guy has a lot of stuff on his website (www.picbook.com) which can be 
downloaded, including the source for all the programs that he goes 
through.  Which is nice, because it saves having to type them in.  
However, he uses absolute code, rather than relocatable, which I don't 
think is good.  On the other hand, though, the explanations for what  
the code is doing are well done, and of course making it relocatable is 
not a big deal.

That is my impression so far.  I'm going to go through all his lessons 
next, so may have a different opinion by the time I finish.  If anyone 
else has any impressions to share, I'd really like to hear them.  Either 
on-list or off-list, as you prefer.

John
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