New Gadgeteer book by Simon Taylor

I just received my copies of ‘Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: Electronics Projects for Hobbyists and Inventors’ by Simon Taylor.  Simon is the founder of Systech Designs LTD, a consulting company that specializes in embedded and M2M communications applications.   Simon has be an active participant in the .NET Micro Framework and the .NET Gadgeteer work for some time now.  Systech Desgins produces both mainboards and modules for Gadgeteer.

I had seen some early drafts of the content of the book and was pleased to see a deeper discussion than in many hobbyist books.   Don’t get me wrong, books of cookbook projects are great for getting people started and engaged.  However, when you are done with those, it really helps to understand more deeply what is behind the projects so that you are doing and what is required to be successful at dreaming up your own, more complex projects.  The first half of the book covers what .NET Gadgeteer is (down to the base classes that are the basis of the application development environment) and how to work with it (down to how to make sure your device is properly configured for the network modules that you are using).  In the second half of the book, Simon gets into the projects by functional category (Data I/O, Serial Communications, File I/O,…) with lots of clear coding examples. 

One other thing that I like about the book is that Simon leverages his understanding of both the .NET Micro Framework and the .NET Gadgeteer to create a bridge between these two environments.   Until now, books have been about one of the other.  The .NET Gadgeteer is built on the .NET Micro Framework with the intention of simplifying the environment.   In some cases, this simplification means a loss of some of the underlying flexibility.  Both of these environments are available to someone developing on Gadgeteer and Simon includes a number of examples where dropping into the .NET Micro Framework can be useful for the application. 

The book is available ( in the US only for now apparently) on Amazon but it seems to be selling well with only a few left so get your order in today.