Book Review: Lego Mindstorms EV3 Essentials

Note: I have been one of the technical reviewers of this book, but I've tried to be fair on the highlights and weaknesses of its materials. Of course that means that I also got a free evaluation copy provided by the publisher.

Review

Title: Lego Mindstorms EV3 Essentials

Author: Abid H. Mujtaba

Although the name of the book looks as something basic, this book is mostly about how to program the third generation of LEGO Mindstorms robots with LeJOS, a custom firmware and SDK that uses Java.

After the usual introduction chapters explaining some basics of the robot, pieces and sensors it comes with, there's a brief chapter on basic "direct" programming using the EV3 brick, and then it goes directly to explain how LeJOS gets installed and developed for.

The book assumes only a bit of experience with Java, so goes into detail about how to setup a development environment, connect with the brick, download your programs there, log information for better debugging and so on. Code examples are simple but clean, Java-style, and not all are basic "hello world"; At the end of the book you'll have robots that follow lines and correct their path accordingly.

It is a small book (less than 200 pages) so you can't expect it to cover every SDK function or sensor capability, instead choosing to give varied (but not too complex) examples so you can explore further on your own. It's good for beginners, but any advanced developer can obtain similar results toying with LeJOS directly.