Starting out with microcontrollers

[nradam]

Can you recommend an ebook to start out with microcontrollers. I am a first year mechanical engineering student and i have no idea about electronics (We only learned electricals in high school). So do i need to learn anything as a prerequisite before i learn microcontrollers?

 

[mgb_phys]

Don't know if there is a book but the place to start is http://www.arduino.cc/
There are dozens of websites and companies based around teaching this micro.

ps the hardware as well as the software and development environment are open source so you can buy different versions of the board from many different places or download the schematics and build one yourself.