Introduction to Microcontrollers (2007) [pdf] (ti.tuwien.ac.at)

I have read the first ten pages and found them well-written, friendly, and very understandable. The example, a heat control system using an ATMega16, is appropriate for explaining the microcontroller components listed in chapter 2 and I'm looking forward to going through each one.

Thank you for posting this. Appreciated.

I skimmed through the book it looks quite comprehensive and well-written. Usually books/guides about microcontrollers get lost in the details of interfacing myriad sensors and actuators without going sufficiently deep in how they actually work.

Although I personally favor Atmel's MCUs, perhaps no one can deny Microchip's (the maker of the PIC line of MCUs) wealth of documentation and application notes [1] which could serve as additional material to refer to for some pretty handy tips and guides.

[1] www.microchip.com/applicationnotes/

If you want to run the AVR examples and don't have a physical target checkout simavr:

https://github.com/buserror/simavr

I found the "getting started with Launchpad" material from TI also very helpful: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Getting_Started_with... - it is a bit of PR for TI products, but yet much is valid for other platforms too.