The Maker’s Manual

$34.99 : By Paolo Aliverti and Andrea Maietta

The Maker’s Manual is a practical and comprehensive guide to becoming a hero of the new industrial revolution. It features hundreds of color images, techniques to transform your ideas into physical projects, and must-have skills like electronics prototyping, 3D printing, and programming. This book’s clear, precise explanations will help you unleash your creativity, make successful projects, and work toward a sustainable maker business.

Make: A Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot

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$19.99 : By Wolfram Donat

Make a Raspberry-Pi Controlled Robot teaches you how to build a capable and upgradeable personal robot for around $100. You’ll learn how to control servos, respond to sensor input, and know where your bot is using GPS. You’ll also learn many ways to connect to your robot and send it instructions, from an SSH connection to sending text messages from your phone.

21st Century Robot

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$24.99 : By Brian David Johnson

When companies develop a new technology, do they ask how it might affect the people who will actually use it? That, more or less, sums up Brian David Johnson’s duties as Intel’s futurist-in-residence. In this fascinating book, Johnson provides a collection of science-fiction prototyping stories that attempt to answer the question.

Getting Started with Arduino — 3rd Edition

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$19.99 : By Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh

Arduino is the hot open-source prototyping platform for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone who wants to create interactive physical environments. Getting Started with Arduino is co-authored by Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi, and incorporates his experience in teaching, using, and creating Arduino. New in this edition is a chapter on Leonardo and an irrigation project for plants and gardens.

Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA

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$16.99 : By Becky Stern and Tyler Cooper

This book introduces readers to building wearable electronics projects using Adafruit’s tiny Flora board: at 4.4 grams, only 1.75 inches in diameter, and featuring Arduino compatibility, it’s the most beginner-friendly way to create wearable projects (see pages 35 and 44 for more information). This book shows you how to plan your wearable circuits, sew with electronics, and write programs that run on the Flora to control the electronics. The Flora family includes an assortment of sensors, as well as RGB LEDs that let you add lighting to your wearable projects.

Encyclopedia of Electronic Components Vol.2

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$29.99 : By Charles Platt

Want to know how to use an electronic component? This second book of a three-volume set includes key information on electronics parts for your projects — complete with photographs, schematics, and diagrams. You’ll learn what each one does, how it works, why it’s useful, and what variants exist. Volume 2 covers signal processing, including LEDs, LCDs, audio, thyristors, digital logic, and amplification.

Getting Started with CNC

$16.99 : By Edward Ford

Getting Started with CNC is the definitive introduction to working with affordable desktop and benchtop CNCs, written by the creator of the popular open-hardware CNC, the Shapeoko. Although inexpensive 3D printers can make great things with plastic, a CNC can carve highly durable pieces out of a block of aluminum, wood, and other materials. This book covers the fundamentals of designing for — and working with — affordable CNCs.

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements Poster Set

By Henry T. Brown; Poster by Liz Rettger $35–$60 : etsy.com/shop/RettgerGalactic

Henry T. Brown’s illustrated book 507 Mechanical Movements is more than a field guide to a menagerie of mechanisms. It’s kind of a Rosetta stone for machinery, showing how you can translate virtually any sort of motion to any other. Worm drives, planetary gears, rack and pinion, clutch boxes, eccentric cams, valves and governors, on and on, with succinct descriptions of how each one works. Published almost 150 years ago, it’s a window into the Industrial Revolution that’s still a touchstone for inventors and machinists today. It’s free on Google Books, but for those who’d like to drink in all the visual richness at once, Liz Rettger has laid out all 507 illustrations on two (or three) wall posters that would grace any maker’s space.

—Keith Hammond

Airplanes from Scratch: The Brooklyn Aerodrome Bible for Hacking the Skies

By Breck Baldwin $16 : Tab Books

If you have been to World Maker Faire in New York, you might have seen Brooklyn Aerodrome’s cheerful triangular airplanes soaring and looping around in the sky. BA sells airplane kits made out of sheets of foam insulation, off-the-shelf motors, and standard transmitters and receivers. The kits are a very economical and kid-friendly entry into learning how to build your ownRC airplane. The Brooklyn Aerodrome Bible is a summary of what the group learned in producing their airplane design. It walks you through the kit, offering bug fixes and hardware alternatives, and shows photos of past plane designs. It’s a fantastic guidebook for building inexpensive RC planes.

—John Baichtal

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