Make: Bluetooth: Mobile Phone, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi Projects with Ble by Alasdair Allan My rating: 3 of 5 stars The book was fine. The projects in here didn’t draw me in as much as some of the other Make electronic books I’ve recently read. I think it’s because most of them were a bit…

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher My rating: 5 of 5 stars I typically read 1-3 fiction books at once (depends on whether I’m caught up on my podcasts and listening to an audiobook), going back and forth between books I already own (say from Humble Bundle or Story Bundle) and books I have to buy.…

Working Stiff by Kevin J. Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars The world of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. is a fun world full of dad jokes and groan-worthy puns. The author doesn’t take himself too seriously and so it’s easy to have fun and roll with it rather than end up rolling your eyes…

Morning Star by Pierce Brown My rating: 3 of 5 stars This initial Red Rising Trilogy is a little like the original Matrix Trilogy (if you haven’t heard, there’s apparently a fourth in the works). The first one was a triumphant, mostly fun story. At the end, our protagonists haven’t 100% won, but you could…

Make a Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot: Building a Rover with Python, Linux, Motors, and Sensors by Wolfram Donat My rating: 4 of 5 stars Donat does a great job of giving the reader everything they need to know to build a rover (like the Mars rover) out of a Raspberry Pi and some motors and sensors.…

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I don’t know if Robert Jordan knew this series was going to be a ton of books, but he clearly knew it was going to be more than one. In a book about the making of Star Wars, the author uncovers…

Getting Started With Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a really GREAT book that, more than some of the other books with the same title, is about Getting Started with electronics; the Raspberry Pi, in this case. The author does a REALLY GOOD job explaining the basics of…

Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt by B.M. Harwani My rating: 3 of 5 stars On the plus side, this book gave me the knowledge I needed to finally complete a GUI for my Extra Life Donation tracker program (https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonation…). I’d tried many different GUI toolkits and none…

Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA: Making Wearables with an Arduino-Compatible Electronics Platform by Becky Stern My rating: 5 of 5 stars First of all, lots of kudos for the authors including lots of photos. Many of the other microcontroller books I’ve read from MAKE have had illustrations, but this one actually has photos and that’s…

Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi My rating: 5 of 5 stars Massimo and his co-writer do an excellent job creating an introduction to the Arduino board. I started mucking around with the boards before reading this book because I’d done some projects with Atmel chips in undergrad (a couple decades ago) and I…

Korean Home Cooking: Classic and Modern Recipes by Sohui Kim My rating: 4 of 5 stars Beautiful photos and well-written recipes fill this book. I’ve added lots of them to my to-cook list. My only disappointment is that the BBQ section is more about grilling indoors than true BBQ. View all my reviews

Love, Fishie by Maddy Gaiman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Since Maddy Gaiman wrote this when she was 8 and I have a nearly-8 year old who loves to read and write, I figured it’d be a fun book to read together. She enjoyed it even though poetry isn’t her thing. I thought it…

Double Life by S. Usher Evans My rating: 3 of 5 stars I met Ms. Usher Evans at Baltimore Comic-Con a year or two ago and she is a very prolific author. If any particular book of yours isn’t your cup of tea, you can try another – she has magical school YA, fantasy, and…

Geekomancy by Michael R. Underwood My rating: 3 of 5 stars To me, this book is Buffy meets Ready Player One done well. As I discussed in my RPO review, it was just way too overhyped for me vs what it delivered. This one, on the other hand, seemed to come from a more genuine…

The Circlet Treasury of Erotic Steampunk by J. Blackmore My rating: 4 of 5 stars As I’ve said many times before – I’ve been exploring more genres recently instead of locking myself into just one. I don’t remember how this ended up in my To-Read list back in 2014, but it’s definitely different than my…