>>> BlackFriday Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee XBee Arduino and Processing
Faludi is kind to the reader by using simple language in the old school of: tell-them-what-you're-going-to-say tell-them and then tell-them-what-you-said.
I bought the book because although I am not a beginner to electronics I am to ZigBee and I am lazy and want a quick start to what to get and why and which "start-bugs" to avoid. Faludi does a good job here and tries to please everybody by including non-Windows based (Mac and Linux) examples where he can (this market is clearly biased towards Windows).
Evidently you could simply download the free ZigBee spec' and read it - it is not too boring and took me about four days to scan through it but for the cheap price I would recommend that even a professional would recover the cost in time saved from this book but evidently he will not be interested in the simplistic treatment of how to connect A to B just the tips and hints and as a quick broad outline for both the spec and the parts range.
For the beginner this book is excellent with both diagrams and photographs of how to wire up the half dozen-or-so connections between one module and another plus very full descriptions + screen shots of how to drive the (mainly Windows based) software.
The firmware example-code is consistently of the simplest-only-to-do-the-principle (there is no cheating by padding with large amounts of code) and gradually the reader is taken into more and more detail about protocols and networking in a painless manner.
A huge amount of work has gone into this book to make it look simple. It is also up to date (late 2010). I highly recommend it to anyone.
