Joshua J. Noble said
I can review my own book, right? Sure, why not? There's quite a few things I'm pretty happy with in this book: the breadth of it, the interviews, and the general tone of it, and that it's covering some territory that's not entirely adequately covered elsewhere. There's a things I wish were better as well: a few of the images are cropped wrong, one of them is actually printed twice, and there's a lot of typos. I'd encourage people to check the errata page on the O'Reilly site (oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154141/errata/), you'll find a lot of corrections there that will give you a way better experience with the book. With all the corrections that have been made over the past few weeks taken into consideration, my rating is 4 stars, the "I like it". Without those taken into consideration I would go with a "it's ok".
K. Sederquist said
What I great book! I was surprised to see how thick this book was.
I am learning the Arduino and have found this book such an in-depth and invaluable reference. It's a well written book that presents each language from the ground up so that even the complete beginner isn't lost. This book is for all, no matter what stage of learning.
If you're just started with the Arduino, or already have some experience with the Arduino and want to learn more you will NOT be disappointed.
Joshua Walton said
When you are beginning Interaction Design it can be hard to know where to start in terms of learning tools. This book provides an excellent overview of many of the tool available and simple examples to get you up and going. It's power is in its diversity. Though I have worked with many of the tools, techniques, and concepts in the book I think that everyone will learn something from this book. As a teacher, this will be my go to book for teaching programming concepts in interaction design.
As a new media lead at the LAB at Rockwell Group ([...]) I love the generalist nature of this book and how it can help to show conceptual overlaps between the different tools.
This is a "must have" book for the bookshelf in our lab and at home.
Joshua Walton
New Media Lead
[...]
Ira Laefsky said
This massive volume provides the artist, designer, or non-technical hobbyist with all the skills they need to create awesome demonstrations, interactive systems and exhibits which exploit the best of what has been developed in Physical Computing and Interaction Design. Contained within this handbook are the tools for the non-technical individual to explore and exploit the capabilities of the Arduino Microcontroller environment, three different and powerful programming environments (Arduino, Processing and openFrameworks), basic Analog and Digital Electronics, Machine Vision and Sound Processing, as well as interviews with leading practitioners of Interaction Design and Physical Computing.
Its all in here in a well explained and comprehensive fashion--everything the artist, designer, or hobbyist needs to exploit programming, microcontrollers, physical computing, sensors and actuators, and interaction design. My only slight nit, on this excellent instructional handbook is that--given there is much too much information to be digested in a few sittings, the navigation and exploration of this important guide to Interactivity, will be somewhat anecdotal and will require tabbing of important spots for subsequent reference.
But this is the best and most up-to-date and comprehensive review of Physical Computing and Interaction Programming available anywhere.
-_Ira Laefsky
Information Technology Consultant and HCI Researcher
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