This book provides a window to many technologies like motion, speech, and vision. It tackles a wide spectrum of topics and is a good place for a beginner to see whats out there.

If you want to control a microprocessor with your PC using Java programs then this is the book to show you how.

You will need to know Java in order to understand the programs. You'll have to set up the Java communications Api, which is just a matter of downloading it from the Sun website and then placing the files in the correct directories on you PC.

He illustrates the use of the Basic Stamp II [...]. This is a great microprocessor to get started with because it's very easy to use and they have great support for beginners. You don't need to know how to program the Basic Stamp as a prerequisite, you can learn this while doing it using a very simple dialect of Basic programming. You can also use the same microprocessor programs he wrote for the Stamp for use with PicBasic, (with some editing) since they're very similar.

You don't need experience programming microprocessors, you learn as you do.
You do need to know Java in order to understand the PC programs written in Java. Even without previous Java experience you can still compile and run the programs from this book and make the "Robots".

If you want to make a robot based on a PC, and you like java as a programming language, this is the book for you. It covers building a robot from a PC, a Basic Stamp II, and a Serial Servo Controller. The author does an amazing job building up classes from the hardware level to the navigation level.

Michael Ferguson

I was taken back when I first got the book as all the sample code seemed to be in Parallax's PBASIC. I thought this was a Java robotics book! But as I got into it, the robot is programmed in Java and talks to BASIC Stamp microcontrollers via serial interface. The microcontrollers handle critical peripherals. He does say that you could use another microcontroller instead of the BASIC Stamp, and suggests the Parallax Javelin Stamp which is programmed in Java as well. In fact, on his web site, he has the Javelin code to replace the PBASIC code in the book if you should decide to go that route and keep everything pure Java (which I recommend as I really like the Javelin Stamp). The book does go into a number of topics such as vision, speech, etc. and does a good job of covering each subject. To me, this is a keeper. It is a good reference.

It is really difficult to rate this book. If you are a hobbyist who is somewhat Java-savvy and you are looking for a book that gives you rather non-complex code that performs complex tasks primarily by harnessing the power of native as well as open source Java API's, I would give this book four stars. If you are looking for some technical or computational details on some of the interesting topics that the author covers I would give it two stars since there is very little of that in this book. Therefore, considering all possible audiences, I give it 3 stars, or an average rating. This book is not a tutorial on the Java API's that it mentions, but it is the only book I know of that even talks about how to do anything with speech synthesis or voice recognition in Java using the free implementation of the Java Speech API, which is FreeTTS. I actually tried out some of the author's Java speech programs, and they do work as advertised. The author performs his interesting tasks by harnessing the Java Beans activation framework, the Java Communications API for serial port communication, FreeTTS and Sphinx API's for speech applications, the Java Advanced Imaging API and Java Media Framework for computer vision and camera control, and the servlet and JSP API for more complex control of a robot. He has even written his own package that pulls together all of these API's to perform integrated tasks, such as object recognition that integrates image processing, camera control, and speech recognition. Thus, I recommend this for a hobbyist who already knows Java and wants to use that language to control robots at a very high system-level. I do not recommend this book for people looking for theory or algorithms related to the topic of robot control. I notice that Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here:
1. A Primer
2. Serial Communication
3. Motion
4. Sensors
5. Speech
6. Vision
7. Navigation
8. Other Topics
9. Sample Programs
A. Definitive Guide API (Author's Software)
B. Microcontroller Reference
C. Robot Parts Reference