Product Description

The popularity of serial communications demands that additional serial port interfaces be developed to meet the expanding requirements of users. The Windows Serial Port Programming Handbook illustrates the principles and methods of developing various serial port interfaces using multiple languages. This comprehensive, hands-on, and practical guide to serial interface programming enables you to develop sophisticated interfaces and apply them in real-world applications.

Each chapter addresses a language and how it can be applied in the development of serial port interfaces. The seven languages discussed are:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #927187 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 824 pages

Customer Reviews

A necessary reference for anyone writing serial interfaces
This book offers a very good and exceptionally practical explanation of how to program PC serial ports. In my job, I have to write interfaces to serial devices, and this book gives me the information I need to make quick work of things no matter what language I am using. Within 2 hours I was able to have a running Visual C++ application reading and writing to a device connected to my COM port. The book goes beyond general concepts,with lots of sample code and detailed line-by-line instruction.
I recommend this book to the student who desires a complete understanding of serial ports, and to the engineer who needs to come rapidly up to speed on how to make use of serial ports in his applications.
The section regarding the hardware aspects of serial ports provides a good basis of understanding the terminology, and is particularly helpful in understanding all the different protocols that are out there. Also helpful was the explanation of the Windows API functions necessary for serial communication. The author also anticipates problems that may arise along the way and suggests ways to avoid them.

Good, but not great
This book allows you to quickly learn how to setup serial port communication in your code so you can read and write bytes on serial port.

However they don't really give you many examples of how to write real world code to interface with serial devices. So if you think this book will help you write the code to communicate with some kind of serial device think again. The book will only give you the foundation for reading and writing serial ports in different programming languages and operating systems. The section on Windows C++ (protected mode) is very limited and most of the information can be found on MSDN.

The most complicated part of serial programming is the two way communication. They only show examples of single threaded code and a Sputnik's sized blip on OVERLAPPED I\O. Overlapped IO is very important if you need real time two way serial communication where you are reading and writing at the same time your program is performing other tasks. Because you dont always want to block your thread on reads and writes.

This book is one of the only book out there that targets serial communication. Overall the book is good and covers a history of serial devices, how to establish communication, and reading\writing bytes on the port. The examples in the book are clear however they lack what I would consider real world application.

Goes wide but not deep
This book tries to cover a large amount of material, and as a result, it only touches on the basics. I was interested in the section on programming serial ports in visual C++ for a windows XP machine. The coverage amounted to 20 pages with no in depth discussion of problems that that might be encountered, and how to troubleshoot them. The book did allow me to do a little bit with serial port communications, but only enough to get me into trouble. I'm still looking for a book that explains how to do this in visual C++ on a Win XP machine. I give it two stars because it is well written, and it does allow the reader to begin to use the serial port.