Practical AVR Microcontrollers: Games, Gadgets, and Home Automation with the Microcontroller Used in the Arduino (Technology in Action)

If you are not a micro person, this might be a stretch, but, if you pay attention and dig just a little, this is a great resource. Well written, lots of good details.

could be better

I thought this book would tell me more on how to program avr using c / c++ for example interrupts and such.Unfortunalty its using sketches and such. This is probably a great book for beginners, but if you have some experience this is rudimentary stuff.

a decent book in terms of the projects, but very unhelpful when it comes to programming the chips. I tried to follow the instructions and even spent about a month researching but no matter what it won't compile or upload. if you already know how to do this it has some very cool ideas in the project section though, and some interesting parts lists.

I bought this to go along with learning about these MCUs and also learning using Arduino development platforms. The book is beautifully written and even though my electronics knowledge is rudimentary, I am able to understand the content easily. I would have to say that this should be considered as a must-have if you intend learning about these wonderful gadgets.

Author uses the Arduino IDE to program micros. It is good in that it goes through the file manipulation to get the programmer to function but the intricacies of the microcontroller itself are not explored in too much depth. It is heavy on learning through projects vice going into details of the AVR. The programmer used is the Pololu USB AVR programmer. If you are looking to make the switch from Arduino to your own design then this is a good text to start you off.However, If you are interested in building a microcontroller platform from scratch and making sure it's efficient then I'd recommend "Avr Microcontroller and Embedded Systems: Using Assembly and C " by Muhammad Ali Mazidi. There are some grammatical errors and one or two things that disagree but all-in-all it will make you incredibly functional on 8-bit AVR.