Something must be said about inspiration. This book is great at providing continuing inspiration in my quest for building with my hands. I am still reading this book, but I love it. The specific practical advice is not always realistic or applicable to anyone, but the back story is fantastic and I love reading how the author turned into maker so quickly and so successfully. Perhaps there is a path down the road of this hobby that offers something different.

This book by the head editor of Wired magazine provides insightful and fascinating view point that we are at a brink of the new industrial revolution. If anything, this blog and my obsession is a living proof. Anderson believes that the current tools, costs and opportunity is immense for those interested in becoming inventors and entrepreneurs at the same time. He offers some convincing evidence, by artificially bringing to the market a new type of sprinkler, following his dad’s footsteps decades ago. It’s a thought provoking read and I highly recommend it.

This is one of the best introductory books to electronics, and it takes time to get through. I am about 25% through, and I already learned so much about physics, electricity and electronics to be pretty dangerous, literally, in my office/workshop. I read enough to understand that a fuse may save me from a fire, and have since promptly purchased a buttload of 2A, 3A, 5A mini car fuses, which work great with big batteries.

Anyway, this book I highly recommend for the fundamentals.

Very short, and very surface level coverage. I did not find this book overly useful, and finished it in a weekend.

This is a fantastic book, very much in depth and with great examples. I am still reading it. Probably the best book on Arduino at the moment.

This book was recommended to me at a meetup, and it’s a thick heavy book. I must admit I only looked through the first third, and have not yet used the recipes in practice. But the breadth of coverage is impressive.

This is another great book with lots of good examples, but all the code is filled with delay(). I’ll discuss in later posts why this is terrible, and offer an alternative. I just started reading it, so standby for more details.

This is a better "short" introduction than Arduino, and uses JavaScript (since BeagleBone now comes with Cloud9 + node.js). I read about a half, since I am not currently working on BeagleBone yet, I am waiting for another moment.