Chapter 3: Great free ROS resource

[neuronet]

The first bits on ROS in the book are basically this example from the docs:
http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/WritingPublisherSubscriber(python)
As I did my grind running code, I didn't feel like I was understanding ROS very well, was worried I would end up just running programs and not understanding what I was doing.

Luckily there is a fantastic free book on ROS available called A Gentle Introduction to ROS. While you can buy it at amazon, it is also freely available at the author's website, and he updates it fairly frequently:

https://cse.sc.edu/~jokane/agitr/

The book is truly excellent, one of those resources you feel lucky exists. It explains ROS from the very basics on up. In particular, Chapters 2 and 3 I worked through very quickly and got up to speed with the basic rudiments of the platform. After that, the stuff in Chapter 3 of our book was very easy.

One thing that was a little unfortunate is the book is written for c++, so there is a little bit of translation you'll have to do, but it isn't that bad. Plus, it can't hurt...