Writing this book turned out to be much more work than I had expected and believe me,
I was already expecting a lot. This project would have never been possible if I did not have
110% support and understanding from my wife. Special thanks also go to Steve Bowling,
a friend, a pilot and an expert of Microchip 16-bit architecture, for reviewing the technical
content of this book and providing many helpful suggestions for the demonstration projects
and hardware experiments. Many thanks go to Eric Lawson for constantly encouraging me
to write and for all the time he spent to fix my eternally long running sentences and my bad
use of punctuation. I owe big thanks also to Thang Nguyen, who was first to launch the
idea of the book; Joe Drzewiecky and Vince Sheard for patiently listening to my frequent
laments, always working hard on making MPLAB a better tool; Calum Wilkie and Guy
McCarthy for addressing quickly all my questions and offering so much help and insight into
the inner workings of the MPLAB C compiler and libraries. Among the technical reviewers
of the second edition, I would like to add special thanks to Stewart Cording, Tom Mignone,
and Wayne Duquaine who helped me adapt the code to the many new families of PIC24
devices. But I would like to extend my gratitude to all my friends, ex-colleagues at Microchip
Technology and the many embedded control engineers I have been honored to work with
over the years. You have so profoundly influenced my work and shaped my experience in the
fantastic world of embedded control.