peripherals

This book has it all. It has to be one of the only good books on the subject. If you look on the web for information on parallel port control, it will probably refer to her book. Her website is a source of tons of information, and is a great addition to the book. A warning however; if you are not familair with computers, or visual basic programming, then this is not the book for you. You really need to have an understanding at the bit level. I highly recommend it.

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.

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.