In last year’s Holiday Gadget Guide, I reviewed the wonderful then-new LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT system. It’s a year later and my admiration for this product has only grown. It has been enthusiastically embraced by robot hobbyists and professionals, educators, kids of all ages, R&D departments looking for quick n’ dirty prototyping components — 1,001 uses. It’s also been embraced by publishers, who’ve followed the product with a felled forest worth of books. Three of may favorites are from No Starch Press (disclosure: O’Reilly, the publisher I work for, distributes No Starch titles).
The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book: Design, Invent, and Build, Martijn Boogaarts, et al, $29.95
Written by the contributors to The NXT STEP blog, this title could be considered the *official* LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT book as most of the contributors were part of the MINDSTORMS Developer Program and helped in the development of the product. Of the three titles here, this is a good place to start in moving beyond the projects and docs that come with the kit. The majority of the book offers step-by-step instructions for building and programming LEGO robots, from RaSPy, a bot that plays Rocks, Paper, Scissors, to Marty, a drawbot. The design is very handsome and the book is well-illustrated. My only criticism is that the CAD-style images are sometimes printed too dark and can be hard to follow. Hopefully, you’re familiar enough with LEGO components by the time you get to this book, you’ll be able to figure out what you can’t clearly see in the artwork.
The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor’s Guide, David J. Perdue, $29.95
Dave Perdue is a long-time brickhead (er… LEGO fanatic) who’s also the author of Competitive MINDSTORMS and a contributor to the BrickJournal. Like the NXT Idea Book, his Unofficial Inventor’s Guide is project-based, but he tries to also get you to think about the nature of the components available, their various capabilities, and how you can employ them and your creativity to successfully design and build your own robots. Some of the projects here are challenging, especially Guard-Bot, a six-legged walker that fires balls at intruders into your robot lair. The design and CAD-style images are the same as in The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book, but better quality paper is used, making the images easier to see.
Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against!, by Ulrik Pilegaard, Mike Dooley, $24.95
My favorite book in the lot is Forbidden LEGO, a collection of playfully irresponsible building projects dreamed up by two former LEGO employees. These are the kinds of toys you imagine designers drafting for fun, but fuddy-duddy safety concerns prevent them from ever coming to market. Things like: a paper airplane launcher and a LEGO plate launcher (which can fire 14 LEGO roof plates in eight seconds). Unlike the other titles, this book is in full color on glossy paper. Note that this is not a MINDSTORMS-specific book. It uses components from the greater LEGO line, mainly from the LEGO Technics range, which may be a problem if you don’t have a large LEGO collection.
All of these books offer great insights into the NXT/LEGO systems, robot building/programming and mechanical engineering in general, and offer lots of really cool projects. Any one of them would be a great gift for a MINDSTORMS/LEGO enthusiast. Together, they’re a formidable LEGO library.
