Exploring LEGO Mindstorms EV3: Tools and Techniques for Building and Programming Robots

This book gives great tips and information on motors and sensors and is a great inspiration. Eun Jung Park is brilliant and skilled with simple amazing robots.

Poor quality images. Short on theoretical illustrations which was the main reason for my purchase. There are many other books that serve this type of audience better. If you seek out the publications from LEGO Masters (Laurens Valk or the inimitable Yoshihito Isogawa) you will not be disappointed. This book left a little to be desired but the author's enthusiasm shines through. The author should seriously think about providing LXF models as downloads to overcome Wiley's penny pinching but price exhorting approach to technical publications.

We recently purchased LEGO Mindstorms EV3 31313 and accepted this book for review. To give you a background we are not very new to LEGO Mindstorms robotics and we have purchased several of this kits & related books in the past. My wife who teaches grades K5-K8 also runs a FLL robotics evening club to spark interests of robotics to kids. Reading this book gives me impression that author has done very good job in writing the contents but the publisher did not follow proper publishing standards and made poor judgements in printing the book in Black & White. Granted it costs a lot more money to publish in color but certain books such as these needs color to identify the parts correctly. Kids who have never seen a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit and parts before will have very hard time identifying the parts to build the robots. If you are used to using LEGO Mindstorms kits before then you might find that the author indeed does give you cool ideas into programming and publisher also allows you to download additional contents from their website. This book does provide excellent resources but reading that content is hard for kids to follow. Adults who have used these kits before might be able to live with B&W graphics but still frustrating at times. Overall I am forced to give this book three stars even-though it is not author's fault. The content is there but sadly not interpret-able unless you are already familiar with EV3 in the past.

The book is very good.It is organized and it is perfect for EV3 learners!

This is a very informative book and if it had color pictures I would have given it 5 stars. It seems to be better written and easier to understand than most other EV3 Mindstorms books which makes it an excellent learning book.

This book is useless without color images. Why would you publish a book like this with dark grey-scale images showing (not) how to build. Even the e-book has grey-scale images. The printed version is less legible than the e-book since the printed images are inferior to the ones in the e-book. The author has obviously put a huge effort into the contents of the book, only to have it negated by poor publishing standards. Unless Wiley make color images available on their web-site, I cannot recommend this book, and I plan to return my copy. Try to look at a sample page with a complex diagram and you will see what I am referring to.

Grandson loved this book!

Really informative guide. The author has really done great research. It is a quality book, but the pictures are in terrible quality black and white. This would be a 5 star book if not for the pictures

My son loves this book. He buried his nose in it as soon as it arrived. They are doing robotics at school and it has really sparked his interest. He says that although the mindstorms used at school are a different model to the ev3 this is a good helpful interesting book!

We've only just entered the Lego mindstorms world, so I will admit that we're only just scratching the surface. This book seems to offer a reasonably good overview for building on the original set. Have to make sure I concentrate to get it all correct, but hours of fun ahead.

We have spent the last few months visiting universities to help my son decide which ones should be on his shortlist to study computer science. Unsurprisingly several of these universities use Lego Mindstorms as a learning and development tool which is all the evidence you need to understand that this isn't just child's-play - it is a platform that has educational potential way into adult life. The attraction of Mindstorms is that your starting point is a fully thought through set of elements. This includes the main brain, sensors, motors, compatibility with a universe of Technic components, and a software platform where you can develop your programs. EV3 is the latest iteration of Mindstorms and while it is even more immediate than previous versions there is so much potential for development that a book like Eun Jung Park's Exploring Lego Mindstorms EV3 will be of value to a wide range of hobbyists and students. The wide range of potential readers means that it's hard to target the right reading level and Park has had to cover a wide range of levels, right from beginner to postgraduate.

This is mainly an introduction to the programming aspects of Mindstorms.(EV3). It starts form a position of almost total ignorance, and proceeds to show you how build increasingly complex devices. The layout is a bit stark, being monochrome and sometimes confusing. The writing is perfectly readable, most importantly the instructions for each build; the tone is however a little bit...americanized - sometimes chatty, sometimes obtusely technical. A bit more editing would have solved this issue. If this is aimed at a child the tone may be a little confusing, and for an adult it is a little off-putting, like being talked down to. If you can overlook this and just focus on the designs themselves then you will have a good time with this guide.

I'm a big fan of Mindstorms, mainly for the Lego building rather than the programming aspect (I do enough of that in my day job...), and have several third-party books like this one which add to the limited paper documentation supplied with the Mindstorms kits themselves. This book concentrates mostly on the programming side of the latest EV3 kit rather than the Lego building, and is positioned as a beginner's guide to programming, starting from first principles and covering most aspects of Mindstorms EV3 coding. It has good, comprehensive coverage of the Mindstorms environment and the code components, and includes instructions for building 5 robots. The building instructions are unfortunately not as clear as those I have seen in other books, such as those from No Starch Press - they compress several stages onto a single page, with every component in an identical shade of grey, and clarity suffers badly as a result; while trying to build one of the models, I spent far too long squinting at tiny grey-on-grey images trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing. This is, I guess, an effect of the book's emphasis on the programming side, so is understandable, but it would have been nice to see a little more space given over to making the instructions a bit clearer. The actual content in terms of learning about programming is good, but I have a problem with the style. Some parts are written in a rather childish and patronising fashion - the reference to a robot that "poops", for example, and comments such as "you will feel very proud of yourself after you get through this process" - it all feels a bit like being talked down to. This doesn't happen all the way through the text, but every now and then a page leaps out as being slightly irritating as a result. This is at odds with the content which is being covered, which seems to be aimed at older children or adults - I'm left wondering who this book is aimed at, as the childish style seems to clash with the adult content, and the book doesn't seem sure who it is addressed to as a result. (The style is also quite American - references to baseball and Wall Street, for example.) If you can overlook the style, this book is a good introduction to the entirety of Mindstorms programming. But there are better-written books available, particularly for readers in the UK.