Sunday, November 09, 2014

Book Update

I apologize for not keeping up with the postings. Most of my free time lately has been spent writing my book, which has not given me much time for anything else. Part of what I am going through is trying to explain concepts that I have used so much they are like second nature to me for the past 30+ years. Think about explaining why 1+1=2 through writing and you get the idea.

But I have 5 solid chapters at this stage, and I have several more in mind, but not quite enough ideas yet to fill the pages I hope to have before the book is "done." I'm shooting for a finished book to be between 80 and 100 pages so I can sell a paper copy for about $10, and pretty much give away electronic versions (I'm trying to stay as affordable as I can with this).

After researching this a bit more, I do believe I can still release the book under Creative Commons via the noncommercial and no derivative version of the license - you can distribute my work as long as I get credit for it, you don't make any changes, and you don't charge for it. That way teachers can make copies for their students (either printed or electronic) and be completely legal. Sure, someone can put it on a torrent site but it isn't a lot of good without buying the board anyway.

Here is the table of contents so far:

Chapter 0: The Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment - or “your programming software”).
Chapter 1: Blink (Blink the LED)
Chapter 2: Variables and Traffic Lights
Chapter 3: Logic, Input from the Outside World, and If Statements (or If the World was Logical)
Chapter 4: Boolean Math and More on the If statement (Not as hard as it sounds!)

Some other concepts to be taught will be sending serial data to the computer, arithmetic operations, more variable types, etc.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to get back to my book!

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