> Having to read the documentation is just as necessary 
> whichever way you go -
...


> Equally programming a small micro requires one to read the 
> documentation to
> find out the quirks of the chip. ...

> Doesn't matter what one does, the documents are there to 
> help. If it
> is obscure then the time comes to ask questions to clear 
> it up.
...

> The people that do get things done, whether it is high
> grades for their degree or almost anything else, they have 
> done it by
> applying themselves, and that is all that is being asked 
> for here. The
> pointers on where to look have been given, now it is up to 
> the learner to go
> learn.

I've been watching this thread with some concern.
IMHO, this is the sort of material that can grow into 
aflame war quite suddenly when someone gets pushed past some 
invisible limit while others are quite oblivious that other 
people may be getting annoyed.

The point I was trying to make in my "Osborne 0 for PICs" 
suggestion was not that people don't have to do the work to 
understand properly but that the concepts involved are 
unusual enough that, when faced with what may be foreign 
concepts such as "FSR" / high bits / always 1 or not / 
direct vs indirect / page - bank - .../ ... which are 
FUNDAMENTALLY trivial, the net result  can be to utterly 
overwhelm the senses/sensors such that the beginner wanders 
in a haze indefinitely and confuses and is confused by 
various overlapping sub concepts.

"... applying themselves ..." & "... all that is being asked 
..." & " ... go learn ..." & "and 'if it was good enough for 
me' uphill in the snow both ways no shoes cardboard box 
bottom of a lake"ing can have vastly different meanings 
depending on where you are standing and on how good your 
vision is re what is involved. Extra non-essential work may 
be character forming and bracing and add to the mystique of 
the processor concerned and assist you in becoming a 
productive and beautiful person, or not, but may not well be 
core to what is being tried to be achieved.

I'm  not suggesting that hard work isn't needed, but rather 
that the area can generate an arbitrarily high amount of 
extra work that is unnecessary and which a truly expert 
educator could cut through with a masterful document. (The 
apparently banal Osborne 0 versus the apparently trivial but 
actually dense Osborne 1). Microchip documents may well 
contain all the information (although the occasional error 
and misplaced comma which has trivial effect on Olin can 
take a week out of the life of a beginner) but Microchip are 
certainly not "truly expert educators". There is a vast bow 
wave of assumed competence and assumed familiarity in the 
material which a just ordinary grand-master after a while 
fails to see. It takes an utterly transcendent-master to see 
the layers of unnecessary confusion present in the plethora 
of material and reach through it to lead the 
wannabee-masters to glory. I know that we have utterly 
transcendent grand masters here and, should they wish to 
turn their talents to it, they would be able to create the 
path through the Fire Swamp which otherwise causes so many 
to founder. The mechanisms of older PIC addressing are 
arcane and quite unlike those of many almost equally 
venerable IC's (eg the now widely evolved Motorola MCxx68xx 
family which started with the original MC6800 never had the 
banking/paging/partial register issues of the early PICS)(I 
started with the MC6800 writing machine code by hand without 
an assembler and was fortunate that the processor had such a 
clean addressing structure).(Actually I started with the 
NatSemi SC/MP but that's another story).

 It may be that the tutorial material mentioned here the 
other day is close enough to the PIC Osborne 0 for 
beginners. It probably needs a cooperative gaggle of 
beginners and transcendent masters to find out.

Meanwhile, " ... you obviously don't understand ..."ings in 
either direction, may or may not be true but may tend to 
ruffle feathers more than intended.



        Russell









-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist