For me, the standard reference work in the field "Physcal Computing"

This book is the standard reference work in terms of physical computing for me. Physical computing means to let a program not only isolated to run on a computer or microcontroller. Rather, it is to communicate with sensors and actuators with its environment. This is a combination of mechanics, electronics and computer science, which is called a training / study by the term mechatronics.
Mechatronics is usually quite expensive and often open source, what you always experienced when again any unit in the car is not working ... ;-)

However, this book here treated mechatronics based on the open source hardware and software platform Arduino. Ie mechatronics for little money and all information available in order to bring the system up and running.
It consists of a number of projects that can be realized successfully without engineering education also people. They can acquire professional knowledge in the field of mechatronics.
For example, is shown in a project, how to equip a stuffed animal with sensors, these sensors reads on the Arduino microcontroller, sends it to a PC via Bluetooth wireless technology and there thus controls a self-programmed retro video game about the arm position of the soft toy. This is electronics valued at approximately 40 and otherwise only open source freeware necessary (both for programming the microcontroller as well as for the graphics programming of the game).

This book is very attractively designed and contains a lot of pictures. Educationally, it is so good that you really only the most elementary skills in electronics and C programming needs to perform as described above such a complex project to success.
But for readers at university level offers to book on almost any topic in-depth information.
Therefore, we use this book even in the Bachelor of Mechatronics at Reutlingen University, for example, in an internship in the field of sensor technology. Me as a teacher has helped this book to make the otherwise sometimes colorless internships for students appealing and motivating.

The author Tom Igoe, a co-founder of the Arduino, is finally a further indication of the high quality of this book.

As to all books in this series Learning by discovery, there is a website with further information and also the source of projects to download. Especially the latter I think is very important because you learn best when you modifying an existing program and not by typing out a source code from a book ...