The UBTECH Jimu Robots Builder’s Guide: How to Create and Make Them Come to Life

This book is available for free download online.

Unsure

--[ SEE UPDATE BELOW FOR MORE RECENT REISSUE ]-- In January 2018 I bought this book for my 12-year-old daughter, who has two robotic summer camps in the bag, and recently received a couple of Jimu bots. She was disappointed with the book and so was I, as its 225 pages add very little to the information one can get from exploring the Jimu application and a Blocky guide for school computer work.More than two thirds of the book are dedicated to list parts, to assemble some of the robots (in most cases with less clarity than in the video guide provided by the Jimu app), and to put together special parts and make them move using the preset "actions" of the software (which is a commented rehash of what the app provides). This is done with the aid of figures of such disastrous quality that is nearly impossible to see clearly the contents in the majority of them. Most figures are extremely dark, as shown by the Fig.1-17 of the book in my first attached image. Further, many of them are so washed out by the lack of contrast that trying to find what are they illustrating is utterly useless, as shown by the Fig. 2-1 of the book on the top half of my second attached image; for comparison, the bottom half shows a grey-scale image of the same object taken with my cell phone camera. Even the figures that are not too dark have a very poor resolution, such as the case of the Tankbot's eyes in Fig.1-8 of the book, shown in the top half of my third image; for comparison, its bottom half shows a grey-scale image of the same eyes with acceptable resolution. I have the inkling it must be extraordinarily difficult to find a guide with worse figures than these.Only the chapter 6 of the book, Advanced Programming Techniques, is not marred by incompetent illustrations. Its so-called advanced programming is simply the basic Blocky functions and commands available for Jimu robots. The chapter briefly visits each command, providing a short explanation often accompanied by a screenshot; there are a few programming examples as well. The writing style of most of Mr Rollins' descriptions and explanations of Blocky programming are more at the level of late teens or adults, rather than that of preteens or perhaps early teens, who are supposed to be the target Jimu users. Curiously, a few of his descriptions, such as "the IR Sensor command is made for the IR Sensor" that managed to elicit a laughing _Duh!_ from my daughter, are at a toddler level.Finally, the printing quality of the book is also very poor. Annoyingly, in most pages it is possible to see what is written on the opposite page of the same sheet (see my attached images). Reading this book is *not* a pleasurable activity. I am surprised the editing staff of the book's publisher dared to disclose their names on the copyright page -- assuming, of course, the names are real.UPDATEThe book now offered by Amazon in October 2018 is a rather recent reissue of the one reviewed above. It seems to have the same text and figures, but --to judge from the "Look Inside" feature-- printing quality has improved. It appears that now it is no longer possible to see what is written on the opposite page of the same sheet. The figures are now printed in color and can be seen better despite their still lamentable resolution (see my fourth image comparing the old greyscale Fig. 1-8 and the new color figure). There is nothing in the copyright page indicating this is a differently printed reissue than the previous book and it has the same ISB numbers and copyright date.It seems to me that the terrible contrast quality of the older edition figures --a disastrous work I would had not expected from a company part of Springer Nature-- was caused by printing color images in greyscale mode (perhaps to reduce printing costs?). If so, they did not do any favors to the author. At any rate, the readability of the figures of this reissue has improved but their image resolution has not, and the worth of the information provided by the book's contents still remains quite disappointing.