Atmel released an 8051 derivative that had internal flash memory instead of a ROM mask. This made it of interest to many people including the home and student market. They have followed this up with a more powerful RISC based architecture that again uses flash memory. Again they are straddling the home and industrial market.

This book is suitable for a beginners or students. The book discusses mainly assembler programming. (Note the C compiler for this chip is a professional IAR system costing around $1000). However there are several pointers to where there are free assemblers and other utilities that should cover most things. There are a good number of projects to keep most students busy for a while.

One useful part of this book is an annotated list of the assembly commands. For beginners this is done very well. Complete with flags affected, cycle times, coding in hex, examples, operation and a description. There is also a fair amount of assembler listings. These are available from the authors web site. Whilst the web site is largely in German (the rest is in English) the comments on the source are all in English.

The book is a little on the expensive side (especially when compared to John Morton's PIC book) but still not bad. However due to the high hobby interest there is a large amount of AVR material becoming available on the net, ironically much of it on the authors own web site! So the life of this, very good, book may be limited.