Hello ROS Fans,

I have written a little book called ROS By Example.  The book is aimed at new ROS users who want to go beyond the Beginner Tutorials and create some working ROS applications, either in simulation or on a real robot like the TurtleBot.  The book provides step-by-step explanations of a number of ROS programming examples using code that can be downloaded from the accompanying ros-by-example repository.  You can see a preview of the book including the table of contents on the ROS By Example web page.

There are some important caveats if you are considering getting the book:

• The companion code is written for ROS Electric, not Fuerte.
• I have tested the code under Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10 but not 12.04 since Debian packages are not available for ROS Electric under 12.04.
• The book assumes the reader has done at least the Beginner Tutorials on the ROS Wiki.  It also assumes at least a one-time reading of the TF tutorials.  In fact, there are a lot of links in the book that point back to the Wiki but this is all in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel.
• The code samples are written in Python, not C++ so if you don't like Python, this book probably isn't for you!
• A print version of the book will be coming soon (hopefully in the next week or two) but I think the PDF version will probably be more useful to most folks.

--patrick

http://www.pirobot.org