One of them relates to hardware, and the other, to discipline.

When I was your age, I knew very little about programming, in fact, little more than that there was such a thing, but I was a senior in college.m By the time I was 19, they called me "Doctor." When I was 20, I was an oversexed, underpaid, hired-killer in a green suit.

UART is an acronym for Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. Now, do you know just how asynchronous and synchronous communication differ? What does one require that the other doesn't? How about isochronous communication? Do you know what that is and how it differs from the former two?

What's the significance of those?

The things that you're forced to learn with the pre-monolithic-microcontroller systems include setup and hold times, propagation delays, registers vs. latches, tristate bus management, bus termination, and such.

Much of that is "virtual" to the user of a monolithic MCU, until he/she attempts to deal with the "real" (external) world, whereupon it suddenly comes back to "bite you in the *ss."

Coding is quite important. MCU's wouldn't be of much use without it, but it's not the be-all and end-all.

There's a big difference between hooking something up to the extent that it appears to "work" and having it solidly and reliably functional. Just ask any of the old-timers in this forum. The majority of queries we see from "newbies" are those wherein "it appears to work" ... but ...

RE