Parallel Port Complete: Programming, Interfacing, & Using the PC’s Parallel Printer Port

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.

Generally a good book.The information is dated, but the concepts remain the same.I thought the book was to be a refresher for me. Yes and No.The very fundamental idea of testing for parallel locations (address) requires effort.The usage of .DLL mentioned on the authors website is pretty much missing from action.

I wanted to know if and how I could use the parallel port to input data from my old Heathkit weather station. It is a free running system that displays in and out door temperatures, barometric pressure and wind speed and direction. It stores the maximum and minimum values of the above too. If I could get the data into my PC, I could archive and analyze it. This book helped me understand the port data lines and how they are used to talk to the peripheral connected to it. It is an old book, Copyright 2000, so the sample programs are in Visual Basic 4.0. I managed to get the idea and use it in my Visual Basic.NET 2003. Using the Inpout32.dll, I can send and get data from the parallel port. I have a ways to go to build the interface box but it does look promising. I have Windows XP Home ED. and a 'Home-brew' PC. running at 2 G Hz.

Excellente and complete, very usefull.

Jan really created a masterpiece here. This book is a must for every hacker's library. Every Visual Basic user needs the information in this book if they plan to use the PP for I/O. In addition, it is full of very helpful information. No fluf pages here, all solid meat!

very good

Did not include disk as was advertised. The disk has a .dll file which was the point of ordering this in the first place as most web sites have pulled the file for some reason. They all refer to this book which was suppose to include the file on disk. The book shown even has a pitcher of the disk on the front. The book I received doesn't have the picture. Not as advertised.

Good book

Probably no longer in print and also representing a near extinct hardware interface this book still serves as a clarifier and guide to the functioning of this original printer port. I had a second hand version from an American college library. It was in excellent condition and still had its original floppy disc.

Der Parallel-Port ist schon fast ausgestorben, aber wenn man irgendwas darüber wissen will: In diesem Buch steht es.

Perfect condition,what a bargain!

Ging ganz gut