USB Design by Example: A Practical Guide to Building I/O Devices

USB Design by Example is an excellent approach to using USB - designs by example. I have tried several of the examples in both VB and VC++, and both are superb. On the embedded side, the explanations are both thorough and understandable. I had a question about one of the example programs, so I emailed John, expecting an auto-response or hearing back in a week or so. He responded in ten minutes with the solution. This is for a novice as well as an intermediate user of USB.

This book is excellent. If you want to start USB desing hardware and software you can use this book with pleasure. It contains a CD with a lot useful software.

I read 3 other books about USB and none of them explained USB better than this book does. This book details a lot of points that others seem to take for granted. If your into hardware and don't want to go into driver design and want to get something going quick this is the book to read. The CD-rom is excellent too, it has a lot of tools and examples that you will need to get started, even sample programs to get you going and templates for your future products. The only downside of the book I feel was the last few chapters, it gets off-topic, more into the consumer products arena and just not technical enough.However this book is worth every penny and I recommend it to all you hardware engineers out there. Good work John (Author)

John begins with a clear and concise explanation of what you need to know about how USB works. Then he starts teaching by example, including source code and circuits. The buttons and lights example has all of the essentials for reading and writing to USB devices, including Visual-Basic source code and EZ-USB assembly code for the peripheral. Many of the examples use Windows' HID drivers, so you don't need to write or install a device driver. There's also Visual-Basic code for detecting and displaying information about all attached USB devices.

I got this book since I thought it would help me with my senior project of connecting an A/D convertor to a PC using USB. It did this and A LOT more. The book explained in a step-by-step fashion exactly what I needed to do and why. Like the previous reviewer I did not appreciate all of the capabilities that USB has to offer and the range of solutions that are possible. But after reading this book in detail I now know that USB can handle real-time data just as easily as static data. I extended my project into a low frequency, digital oscilloscope and this is being used by other students with their audio projects. This project was much easier than building and installing an ISA card in the PC. I will now use USB for all my future projects. Thank you for a most excellent cookbook.