Friday, December 7, 2012

My Review of The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide (Now in Color!), 2nd Edition

Well, I'm on a roll right now going through LEGO books and I have to say this is an EXCELLENT reference book for anyone that's in to LEGO bricks. I haven't really played with them for a while and what little I've dabbled in lately has been Technic/Mindstorms stuff so looking through his book brought back some memories.
As a note up front, this guide only goes through all the basic bricks and doesn't really touch the custom parts for different series or Technic stuff. Just good ol' plain LEGOs.
First off, it's in color and that's a definite plus. I'm sure you could get by with B&W but having it color makes things that much more clear and vivid.
The book starts with the basics such as names, sizes, and things like that and explains how they connect together and stay together because of the design. Kind of a nice way to get started for a new person.
Then it goes into basic techniques on how to build better walls by overlapping. Very handy for different types of builds. They were thorough on things too, which was quite welcome.
Then they moved to more project related elements that added to the basics explained before with a lot of good pictures and explanations on how to put it together. I liked how you could build a ball. It did a good job documenting it all. Eventually, you get to how you build an entire Sphinx. Not bad.
One feature I thought was nice was an explanation on how to make mosaics or patterns from real images. You take a digital picture, pixelate it quite a bit, and then it's possible to make something similar. There are also techniques using graph paper that help in making patterns that I never thought about doing.
Then in the Appendix, there was a parts listing for basically every brick with it's name, size, and description. That is very handy for anyone looking for something specific.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone as a reference. It's well done and a great book to have.

Disclaimer: This book was received as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. All comments represent my thoughts and opinions.

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