Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

Last week it occurred to me that I was bothering Nick a bit too much for his knowledge of electronics.  He has been pretty happy to assist me as I explore his realm of expertise, however I think i have a bit too many questions.  

I decided to find an alternate source of reference material and found O’Reilly’s “Designing Embedded Hardware”.  The book looked to be just what I needed, and I am an amazon Prime member – so the book arrived yesterday (friday).  I don’t make the most monies, but I suppose that I can justify this rather expensive book by the fact that it is a useful skill I am learning, not just some trash.

I dug into the book today (yay for saturday fun!!!  Reading reference material is always fun!) and immediately got the sensation that I was back at Hope sitting in a CSCI class.  In this case, the same as it was when I was there, this is just fine as I am learning something interesting to me, so I am enjoying it quite a bit.

The book itself starts out with some of the standard theory – “This is what a computer is”, “this is what a processor is”, etc.  Which is all fine and good, but not what I immediately need.  I quickly read the first chapter on computer theory, microprocesors, and microcontrollers (didn’t concretely realize the difference before), then skipped the next chapter on Assembly Language because it was assembly for a PIC and some other chip, not for AVRs, which I am currently interested in.  The next chapter, “Basics of electricity” is really what I need, and I am knee deep in it now.

Sofar so good.  You can pick up the book at Amazon (note I do not get any kickbacks from Amazon or O’Rielly)