Hello Everyone,
I may sound very stupid and silly but I am new to the world of ucs... I just learnt programming 8051 at college and I love ucs and I want to get good at it and I am really good at programming what I lack is the knowledge of the hardware part of it. Specially the recently developed technologies in ucs.

Here are my questions:

After using 8051, I really believe that I could do almost anything with just 8051 so I have started to think 8051 is just good enough except when one needs more RAM or speed or ROM and yes the RTC.
So am I right here? Why the PIC family and most importantly whats this arduino thing? why use it when you can do so much with just any other uc? I am so happy with 8051 but I just go dizzy when all the forums are talking so much about so many different ucs. please tell me what I am missing and what I must read. I have just read one book "The 8051 Microcontroller And Embedded Systems Using Assembly And C" by Mazidi. So tell me what other books I MUST read.

And please tell me how to design a programmer for a given microcontroller..... I know ISP is in... but even then this question is so much in my mind... suppose I want to design a programmer for AT89C51 how to go about it? what should look at in the data sheet... please answer this question....


How does a programmer really put the code into the chip? for example, what ports should be activated? what voltages etc...

please answer my questions I would really grateful to you