Parallel Port Complete: Programming, Interfacing, & Using the Pc's Parallel Printer Port

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for the home gageteer. The author Jan Axelson is a rare example of someone that knows her stuff, explains it well to novices, and provides excellent generic examples of code. The examples provided cover situations such as; exporting data bits out thru the parallel port, reading info from the data port, searching for data ports and addresses, and using the parallel port to communicate pc to pc. Seldom do you find a "can-do" person that provides excellent instruction at a beginner's level. The fascination of this book is that as home computers become more powerful, they are still limited in their effect on the external environment, except through dedicated peripherals, such as printers, scanners, etc. With this book, a pc port relay kit (purchased off the internet), and maybe a semester of Visual Basic instruction and " you da man ". Once you can open and close a relay connected to your parallel port from a visual basic program you are off and running. Most electrical devices in you home become fair game. This book needs an update, except for a Tour-de Force in the beginning chapters of code segments in Pascal, Assembler And Quick-Basic, the remainder of the book is in Visual basic 4.0. This reader had no problem importing the examples provided on the enclosed floppy disk into Visual Basic 5.0 . This author has also written a sister book "The Complete Serial Port ", and it is on my "must read " list.

Excellent book. Technical issues discussed with great clarity and thourough understanding.A painstacking effort. Equally useful for hobyyists and professionals. Provides great insight into the working of parallel port and how best we can make use of this feature for interfacing the PC with external world.Several practical circuits given along with the VB programs.-Strongly Recommended.-Prof. M.G.BHATIA

This is a very good book for VB programmers who need to do communication programming over the parallel port. It includes a disk with a custom dll for accessing the port with several great examples and techniques of writing a communication program to be used by the parallel port. This book will be a great help to VB programmers who don't want to write C code to access the parallel port.

This is a very good book for those interested in controlling the parallel port interface on the PC. The most common usage is for cheap/inexpensive data acquisition or control, but the book also covers "LapLink" type transfers, high speed printing and device chaining. In my opinion, this books greatest strength is that all of the code is provided in Visual Basic, Delphi and C. Visual Basic and Win95/WinNT cannot directly control the printer port, so the authors have made a library of routines for use with any language, thus filling a hole that exists in Visual Basic. Anyone who wants to directly control the parallel port from Visual Basic will find everything they need (both on disk and in instruction) in this book.

Axelson's book conducts you through the intricacies of accessing your PC parallel port from Visual Basic. It covers the all-important hardware details of each variation of parallel port, so that you can understand what may (and may not) be done using them. Sufficient example programs are included to illustrate each topic. Also included are the 16-bit and 32-bit DLLs required to access the parallel port I/O registers