Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

by Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernández

Learning ROS for Robotics Programming

332 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 2013

Reviews

[Antonio Domínguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

ROS (ros.org) is actually the de facto standard for programming robots out there, and if you are willing to get a fast deep hands-on guide to get into it, this is your book. There is plenty of information available on Internet to start using and learning ROS. It is a lot of information to sieve, specially for a newbie on robotics. This book, being the first on ROS I know to the best of my knowledge, comes to the rescue, it will save a lot of your time, if you are just starting with ROS.

In my opinion, the structure of the book has been wisely chosen, starting from installing ROS to finishing on more advanced topics like using really complex robots on simulation, advancing step by step from chapter to chapter growing incrementally in complexity as we advance our reading. And, albeit, the authors do not present the most updated version of ROS there is, ROS Hydro, all we learn through it, is applicable to it.

So, whether you be, an amateur roboticist, a student in robotics engineering, or a seasoned engineer in robotics, willing to give a try to ROS for programming robotic systems, I think this book is a good cicerone to get into it fast and deep.

[Jorge Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting reading for those newcomers to ROS. I will never criticize the old good way of learning something by playing with. But this book combines deep enough theoretical background with hands-on examples, making the learning process both faster and sounder. The result: at the end you will have a good understanding of what is ROS and why it is so powerful, together with practical skills to start working with it and go deeper in the areas you will focus on. The book doesn't (and doesn't pretend to) extensively cover all aspects of ROS, but to highlight the most important ones and provide hints on how to go deeper if necessary.

Another plus for the book: programmers already familiar with ROS (as me) will find many interesting tricks and options no always covered in the ROS wiki. For example, the debugging macros are way more powerful that I though.

[Amino Joulani]

nice