Buying I.T.-themed books

I've recently been in the market for a couple I.T. themed books. Specifically, I'm  looking for Raspberry Pi and Arduino books.

I have a home-brewed approach to book selections which has worked pretty well for me. In the past 10 years (I figure), I've first searched out my subject matter on Amazon.com, and then looked at the available titles. From these, I generally like to look at the one-star reviews first, as these often have to do with either shipping or the format (physical vs Kindle). I've read that there is a lot of trolling and inflation of reviews on Amazon (especially in fiction), so I try to keep a "weather eye" on reviews.

I've found that, as good as a book may be, it may never get 5 stars... and even a "bad" book may may manage 3 stars. So, I look at the 1 star reviews first. Typically, at least 10% of these have to do with the format or shipping issues; as I typically purchase books in a physical, paper format, these critiques (while valid) do not concern me. Another 10% are books purchased by the folks who are best described as clueless: "I bought "Intro To Quantuum Physics" for my four year old great-great grand niece...."

Whatever- this 20% is rubbish and can be discounted, as far as I am concerned.

The rest of it...,  well, I've heard a lot of late about rating inflation on Amazon. I'm not sure how this affects nonfiction, but  it surely affects fiction. Still...reviews of nonfiction works are plagued by well-meaning reviewers, to the point of making reviews problematic.

Here's a "typical" review (with the positive and the negative presented simultaneously)-

"/* I recently purchased "The B#+ Language for the Completely Clueless". This book is (useless) wonderful. What an incredible (waste of) time! The author starts with (overly simple) code and (slowly) builds from there (you need the 3rd party errata to wade through the defective code). Developers of all levels will admire (gag at) the flexibility (complexity and ridiculous syntax) of the language and (sleep through) the seventeen ways to print "Hello World". And that's just the first chapter! */

The "positive" reviewer- A. Niceguy. Goal: learn enough of B#+ for the Arduino and Raspberry Pi so his 4th and 2nd grade daughters can learn programming. Background: the office PowerPoint expert.

The "(negative(" reviewer- A. Sysadmin Ph.D. in Computer Science.  Goal: evaluate B#+ before rolling out to an internal network of ~1K devs. Was the 1st Banyan Vines network admin of his company; later led the Banyan>> Novell migration, and currently is the network admin of a 10K+ Linux network. Lead developer for all internally created software. On a first name basis with Linus Torvalds and Larry Ellison."

And this is why computer books are so bloody difficult to purchase. My backstory is as complicated as anyone's when it comes to this stuff. I'm self-taught in many areas of tech, with interests ranging from Big Data to relational DBs to IoT and its myriad of applications to photography to single board computing devices.

My "thing", though, when it comes to learning something that is completely new, is a book. I mean, I understand that much of what I want to learn is freely available on the internet- or someone might even have taken some *ahem* liberties with copyrights and published some titles without the author's permission. My bottom line is that I prefer to legally acquire copyrighted works, and as I don't always find a video presentation useful or readily accessible, I like to have the physical book at hand.

And so, I purchase physical copies of books. One I'd like to recommend today is from Jack Purdum, Ph.D. Dr. Purdum is a longtime college-level programming instructor, and his book is "Beginning C for Arduino, Second Edition.

I was attracted to this book because Mr. T and I both have Arduinos, and C is a language you can't go wrong with. What I found interesting about this book was its cover, which shows an Arduino Uno with the SMD version of the ATmel328 rather than the DIP version (yes, I know what both of those are- even thought this may be amateur writing, the content is totally pro: for those who might be wondering, SMD is surface mount [package] device, and DIP is Dual Inline Package; that is, the device is inserted into a socket rather than being soldered on to the board.)


I think that's all for now. I need to visit the Arduino site and update the software on my laptop. Mr. T needs to do the same for his computer, and then we will delve into the wonderful world of microprocessors, microcontrollers and programming.

Until then, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.