I'm a designer and I design web sites for a living, and this book didn't click with me. The topics in the book are repeated over and over and over and over again--simplicity and usability.
A better theme would've been "achieving beauty from simplicity".
While this is a good lesson to learn, unfortunately this makes for boring reading, and Nielson isn't even witty when compared to Edward Tufte.

Pros: Great academic reading, pages are in full color, great for
web designers who can't design and need to conform to
common everyday looking web sites.

Cons: Expensive for the little insights of do's and don'ts,
too much of the insights are really just common sense.

I remember reading the first edition of the book and feeling disappointed, because this book showed you the various robot products that you could by, it really wasn't a tutorial that showed you how to complete a single robot from step one to finish. In many respects the second edition is written in much the same vain as the first edition. It's better to get this book if your an intermediate robot builder.

There are some many reasons why this is a good robot book, so here are three of them. First it gets you thinking and about building robots motivated me by the descriptions, second it tells you which kits or products are on the market, and finally
there are snippets of essential circuit board schematics.

I really liked this book, Brooks writes in a very conversational style, he explains some theory mixed in with the here and now of his life--good if your like me and enjoy listening to tales about how robots are created, but to some it might be boring. For me, the most interesting part was in the appendix about how Genghis worked.

This book won't tell you how electronics work or advise which microcontroller to use. I found that it does succeed in inspiring the reader to create better robots through the colorful images and the design philosophies of the robot builders.

As a graphic designer by trade, I dabble in building robots. The BEAM philosophy for building robots is really quite amazing because the focus is on reuse of discarded electronics while striving to make your robots look as asthetically pleasing as possible. The strength of this work is that now everybody may build a robot easily and quickly.

I found David Cook's book to one of the best robot books out there for 3 reasons. First, David teaches you electronics as you go through the book; and you don't even realize that your learning electronics your just thinking, "I want to know this to build a cool robot." Second, unlike most other robot books, this one is for the beginner and takes the builder all the way through the completion of a single project--a line following robot. Finally, David Cook maintains a website that provides updates to his book and useful links for even more robot building resources. I strongly feel that this shows the author's dedication to encouraging novice robot builders to continue building robots.