Getting Started with Arduino, authored by Arduino co-founder
Massimo Banzi, offers a brief, fun, and lucid overview of
Arduino that will appeal to lots of people who've been wanting
to get into physical computing and want a way in. This handy
little guide should be just the ticket. To work with the
introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB
Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. The Arduino Platform Arduino
is composed of two major parts: the Arduino board, which is the
piece of hardware you work on when you build your objects; and
the Arduino IDE, the piece of software you run on your computer.
You use the IDE to create a sketch (a little computer program)
that you upload to the Arduino board. The sketch tells the board
what to do. Not too long ago, working on hardware meant building
circuits from scratch, using hundreds of different components
with strange names like resistor, capacitor, inductor,
transistor, and so on. Every circuit was “wired” to do one
specific application, and making changes