This is a very short 5 chapters book for those of you who have recently purchased or would like to purchase a simple common Arduino (or Arduino kit).

All Arduinos come with a short instruction to run the 'blink' program which essentially just blinks a LED (usually one that is embedded in the Arduino board itself) to show that everything is working. From then on, the owner of the Arduino is on their own.

Romily put together this e-book to help you take the next few steps. It goes over 5 little exercises that make you familiar with 5 very common components for the Arduino family: embedded LEDs, external LEDs, buttons, analog inputs for things like ight sensors, and sound emitting devices.

The first two chapters require only an arduino board so you can get started without any other components. The first chapter shows you how to use the Arduino to generate a random text message like the unix program 'fortune' does and display it on your computer. Romily goes fairly slowly and explains every step in the code as the book is suitable for non-programmers. As a programmer, you will likely finish the chapter up quickly.

The second chapter shows us how to blink the embedded LED to generate morse code for anything we might type on our computer. You learn how to control a digital input/output which will be key for the rest of the work.

Chapter 3 goes a little more in depth into controlling multiple digital input/outputs and dealing with binary base and bit operations. We learn to create a nice ripple effect on a series of external LEDs and then change them to display a number in binary.

Chapter 4 brings us knowledge about how to control both buttons as well as a buzzer (or any other component that can generate sounds). We go into a little bit of electronic details about what a button is from an electric perspective and the consequences we have to keep in mind. Following that, we work on connecting the buzzer to the arduino board so that we can have a doorbell ring that plays every time you push the button.

In the last chapter, Romily shows us what a light dependent resistor (LDR) is and how analog inputs can provide us with a less discrete world than digital (ON or OFF). Using the LDR and some LEDs, we build a simple system that shows how light (or dark) it is in the room the sensor is in by a scale of LEDs.

The e-book is a great way to get started with Arduinos even if you're not a techie. If you buy one of the full fledged kits that many arduino vendors offer, you'll likely receive an instruction manual that will cover the usage of many of the components Romily talks about but if you're really trying to get a grasp of it, Romily's book requires very little investment in both time and money to get a very good sense of how to have fun with an Arduino.