Book excerpt: Microcontrollers Fundamentals for Engineers and Scientists provides practicing scientists and engineers a tutorial on the fundamental concepts and the use of microcontrollers. Today, microcontrollers, or single integrated circuit (chip) computers, play critical roles in almost all instrumentation and control systems. There are a number of books that explore the fascinating world of microcontroller theory and applications. However, most of these are geared toward undergraduate and graduate students taking an electrical and/or computer engineering course. Furthermore, these texts have been written with a particular model of microcontroller as the target discussion. These textbooks also require a requisite knowledge of digital design fundamentals.In this textbook, authors Steven Barrett and Daniel Pack present the fundamental concepts common to all microcontrollers. The book presents the over-arching theory of microcontroller operation and provides a detailed discussion on constituent subsystems available in most microcontrollers. The text can be readily applied to a wide variety of microcontroller technologies, allowing practicing scientists and engineers to become acquainted with basic concepts prior to beginning a design involving a specific microcontroller. Both authors have used a wide variety of microcontrollers from various manufacturers and have found that the fundamental principles of a given microcontroller are easily transferred to other controllers. Although this is a relatively small textbook, it is packed with useful information and allows students and professionals to quickly come up to speed on microcontroller concepts.