I agree with that in theory. My hesitation is that if newbies use state of the art, there is a lot of "under the hood" architecture issues that won't make as much sense as if you know the state of the art technology got where it is. It's easy to not learn the first thing about the address bus, the address latch, etc. if you have a state-of-the-art processor that has everything on-chip.

At this point, a person could buy a SiLabs kit and use a 'C' compiler and write some code knowing precious little about how it works. I'm hoping my book produces more knowledgeable developers rather than just code monkeys that can write code but have no idea how it works or whether or not it is efficient. I fear that basing everything on state-of-the-art processors might hide too much of the inner workings that separates a code money from a knowledgeable 8052 developer.

Remember that I'm talking about a book that tries to teach these concepts. I'm not arguing what is better for the professional or experienced developer. I'm wondering which approach is most instructive for learning.

That's the reason I went with the much less complete Atmel parts as opposed to something more state-of-the-art. It's not state-of-the-art, but I think it's probable that a newbie will gain a wider breadth of knowledge from the traditional hardware than the new stuff. And while ICE is great, I think you ultimately learn more by banging your head trying to figure out what's going wrong by having to think about your code and trying to consider where it could be failing rather than just stepping through it until your program happens to do something you weren't expecting.

Regards,
Craig Steiner