Writing this book turned out to be much more work than I had expected and， believe me， I was already

　　expecting a lot. This project would never have been possible if I did not have 110% support and

　　understanding from my wife， Sara. Special thanks also go to Steve Bowling， a friend， a pilot and an

　　expert on Microchip 16-bit architecture， for reviewing the technical content of this book and providing

　　many helpful suggestions for the demonstration projects and hardware experiments. Many thanks go

　　to Eric Lawson for constantly encouraging me to write and for all the time he spent fi xing my eternally

　　long-running sentences and my bad use of punctuation. I owe big thanks also to Thang Nguyen， who

　　was fi rst to launch the idea of the book; Joe Drzewiecky and Vince Sheard for patiently listening to my

　　frequent laments and， always working hard on making MPLAB? IDE a better tool; Calum Wilkie and

　　Guy McCarthy for quickly addressing all my questions and offering so much help and insight into the

　　inner workings of the MPLAB C30 compiler and libraries. I would also like to extend my gratitude

　　to all my friends and colleagues at Microchip Technology and the many embedded-control engineers

　　I have been honored to work with over the years. You have so profoundly infl uenced my work and

　　shaped my experience in the fantastic world of embedded control.