The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide,   ISBN:9781593270544

Customer Rating: 

This book was well written and informative. However, the reading level was far above an 8 year old. But he can grow into it.

Customer Rating: 

I used this book to create my curriculum for a Lego Building class that I teach to a group of homeschoolers. It helped me teach the children the element identifications and different techniques for building. It had some great building models and also came with the instructions. There is also a website listed in the book that you can go to and get even more information. My 8-year old daughter started reading the book and was able to teach herself the different types of elements. It's a great book to really learn all you need to know about Legos! I highly recommend this book if you want to spend some time with your children and expand their Lego knoweledge or your own!

Customer Rating: 

I am 33 and I have recently started building Lego again after a 13 year break. I bought this book out of curiosity and it turned out to be a great refresher course and summarized many things I had spent far too much time looking for in the very extensive online community.

I noticed that several people who gave this book a negative review had one thing in common. They bought this book for a young child, hoping it would be a huge collection of colorful instructions that we are all familiar with from the sets that we buy. I guess the idea being that it will keep the child busy, on their own, for hours on end. This book won't do that, but that definitely doesn't mean that it can't be used with young children who like to build Lego. A parent might have to be around initially to take the ideas off the pages, and present them to their child in a way that they can use those techniques to build the things they like. I actually see this as a great opportunity for both the child and the parent to be creative together. Ideas like board games, mosaics, or micro models are great and show a completely new way of how parts can be used.

I agree with what some other reviewers have said, that on its own, this book is ideal for older children who might be looking to further their skills, or find a solution to a problem. This book has plenty of instructions, and practical examples to illustrate how techniques work without spoon feeding you. Expensive color prints are not needed for what this book wants to show you and that has made these 300 pages very good value for money. Personally I would have placed more emphasis on some subjects and less on others, but this opinion will be different from one person to the next depending on what they already know.

Lego parts and building techniques have developed a lot since this book was initially published, to the point where very experienced builders won't find examples of advanced SNOT techniques, dioramas, or specific themes that they currently see online. That however, is also not what this book is aiming at. If you are an experienced builder you can buy this book if you want a comprehensive reference of the most important building techniques, tools and parts to compliment other Lego literature you might have in your collection. If the author were to make another book summarizing the current, advanced building techniques, with updated parts, I would definitely buy that one too!

Customer Rating: 

While this book does have a lot of information on the various Lego bricks and pieces, it does not offer much in the way of actual structural examples. There are very few pictures and none of them are in color. This book is more about explaining the different Lego parts and their potential uses. My 7 and 9 year old have shown very little interest in this book which I would say is mistitled.

Customer Rating: 

I found this book valuable in the chapters that presented how to plan out lego designs in terms of color, proportions and scale. Perhaps my expectations were way too high when I ordered this book, cause I was a little let down, but I still found it interesting. Some of the chapters were informative but just shared info that a little research on the lego website would offer. The author did put a lot of effort into this book -- there are some fun little projects (train station and space shuttle that should be fun to build if I have enough legos). It's just that I was expecting the book to be Disneyland and it wasn't. But for the price I bought it I can't complain.