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	8.5
	Author: Jonathan B. Knudsen Excerpt: The Unofficial Guide to LEGO Mindstorms Robots shows you how to take your robots to the next level. This book is a hands-on guide to getting the most out of your robot building experience. It goes far beyond the stuf you get in the Robotics Invention System. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

If you look really carefully at the cover shot of the book, you'll see it says "Giving Beyond What Comes in the Box" at the top - and this definitely sells the book. The book spends very little talking about building the robots, and even less time talking about using the LEGO RCX Environment. The book introduces you to NQC, pbForth, and legOS - as well as a chapter on making your own sensors and other hacks.

The book is actually aimed at people (most likely programmers) who have spent a little time around Mindstorms, but want to play with the power of the RCX more the standard software allows. The first chapter introduces you to the whole concept of Mindstorms and robots (which seemed a little redundant given the audience), the next two chapters are spent looking at simple robots and use the standard LEGO software. Chapter 4 jumps into Not Quite C, a great little language that allows you to write small but relatively powerful programs. Chapter 5 is spent building a rather mechanically complex robot powered by NQC. We then have chapters on pbForth, communicating with multiple robots, using the spirit.ocx ActiveX control, legOS and how to make your own sensors.

The writing style is relaxed and friendly, and the illustrations are relatively well done - although the lack of colour and the fact they are photos not schematics can sometimes confuse the diagram. One excellent feature of the book is the online resources section at the end of each chapter that gives you 5-8 web links to explore. While many books have links, a lot of them are affiliated links or "see <book homepage> for more details", this book has official pages and personal pages. The book also has a excellent appendix that details where to get spare parts, and has a table of all the different language support that have been developed for use with the RCX.

Were there any problems with the book? Well, the only robot that I wanted to build within the book cannot be built with version 1.5, since it has less gears that the 1.0 release. It seemed strange for the book to support v1.0 since v1.5 was out and is the version that LEGO is pushing. The book was also a little short for the price. Overall, though, this book was an excellent read and has enlightened me greatly to the real potential of the RCX and Mindstorms - thoroughly recommended!