Nothing in the review about the Actual Internet
Hey, people, read my title! The review does not mention one thing about how you'd actually put any of this on the internet itself, though it's in the book title. Talk about short attention span issues.
I'm no security expert, though I've been reading them on the inet for decades, and yes, have had my home network pen tested now and again. I was the one who brought up security - nothing in the review about that either. Hence the fail icon.
I was a systems, including embedded, designer in my career as an engineer, and FWIW, I happen to like PICs myself - they often saved our customers quite a chunk of change on products made in volume. I use them here. They fer sure had the very best built in IO hardware, and "just worked" though others are now catching on.
Why then, did I choose Raspi and Arduino Uno for my own stuff? I'm tired of laying out boards, writing basic drivers and opsys, and these are both so cheap I can afford to keep hot spares for *everything* - even stuff expected to fail no sooner than a decade. Will your pic chip still be shipping then? Or the Intel Nuc's I favor for x86 use, mostly? Will x86 even still be around? By then I'll be too old for a do-over.
Seems likely that due to wide uptake, the web will be around, or at least html, TCP/IP, and I'll have spares for the rest. And that's the point here - this is meant to live quite a long time (as long as I live, or care). Thus, while neither of my choices for the master per building or the slaves that do the sensing are ideal from a systems design point of view in say mips per watt - or dollar - they are ideal in that there's a hot spare literally on the site, within feet of everything. And oh yeah - the pi's can run the arduino dev IDE...and their own.
I'm perhaps lucky that there is in fact no need to control anything remotely at all - I am almost always home anyway. I actually don't see much value other than "look, shiny, buy my stuff" in that ability, and do see (as a previous Reg article mentions) some serious security issues just so one could turn up one's heat during the drive home to save some pennies. I don't see that as worth it with the current state of hacking for troll reasons, much less APT types. Just my rarely humble opinion of course. And I could do this - I do have a website linked above (as well as a somewhat interesting youtube channel as dcfusor). But I choose not to for the reasons mentioned. Regular automation is fine for me, and I have unusual needs due to homesteading rather than say, living in a conventional apartment or home. A lot of things here were done with much more manual input than the average guy does - he substitutes having a job and money (the oldest form of magic - "let it be done", now working for $) for that kind of thing, I don't. So in this case, I'm literally working for myself, building things that save my own labor down the road so I have more time for more fun of other sorts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
