The 9 Best Lego Mindstorms EV3 Books

Anyone opening a home EV3 set for the first time should start with Laurens Valk's EV3 Discovery Book. It walks from a first moving robot through sensors, gears, data wires, variables and homemade blocks, building six robots along the way, from a simple rover to a gripper and a walking creature. Short challenges close each chapter, so readers practice instead of copying. The drawback is that it's written around the home set, so a school kit isn't a direct match.

Tinkerers who would rather borrow a clever mechanism than follow a full robot recipe get plenty from Yoshihito Isogawa's EV3 Idea Book. It shows 181 small machines, such as steerable crawlers, ball shooters, grabbing arms and cars with suspension, each with a parts list and photos from several angles. Readers work out the build from the pictures, which teaches how gears and linkages fit together. There are no step-by-step instructions, so it can frustrate a first-time builder.

Daniele Benedettelli's EV3 Laboratory suits readers who want bigger, stranger robots with real science behind them. Its five builds include a rover, a race car, a guard robot and a walking dinosaur, and one runs on programs made right on the brick, with no computer. Experiments fold math and engineering into the projects, and the author's site offers the program files and bonus models. It needs the home set, and the denser chapters suit older kids.

Terry Griffin's The Art of EV3 Programming is for kids and adults who can already build and now want their robot to think. It uses one simple driving robot throughout and goes deep into the block software: data wires, variables, arrays, saving data to files, running tasks side by side and a smooth line follower. It works with either the home or school set. It assumes the basics are done, and the building side stays thin.

For a First Lego League team chasing a robot that does the same thing every run, James Trobaugh's Winning Design! is a coach's reference. It covers chassis design, driving straight, consistent turns, following lines and attachments that push, grab or lift, then moves on to organizing programs and presenting the work to judges. This second edition is built on the EV3 kit. Because it's written for competition, casual builders may find it dry.

Gene Harding wrote Programming EV3 My Blocks for coaches and mentors who want a team's code to stop drifting off course. Its short chapters build reusable custom blocks for moving straight, turning in place, finding lines and following walls, along with unit conversions and matching motors to sensors. The goal is code a team can trust on a competition table. It's a slim, focused book that assumes readers already know the basic software.

Robotics teacher Damien Kee built Classroom Activities: EV3 as a ready-made 10-week course for the school version of the kit. Over 20 chapters follow a planet-exploration story, adding sensors and programming ideas one step at a time around a single rover with attachments. Each lesson comes with teacher notes and worksheets to copy or download. It dates from the kit's launch year and leans on the original computer software.

Teachers who are new to robotics get a patient start from Lego EV3 Robotics by Mariappan Jawaharlal, a Cal Poly Pomona engineering professor who runs a school robotics outreach program. It lays out a structured course, explains the engineering terms a nonengineer needs and supplies sample programs to build on. The approach suits a club or class more than a lone kid at home. Few readers have reviewed it, so evidence on how it works in class is thin.

Readers who want to program in a real language should look at Maximum Lego EV3 by Brian Bagnall, a key developer of leJOS, the free Java system for the brick. It covers installing Java, eight robots with rendered building steps, navigation, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and logging into the brick's own Linux system. It suits teens and adults with some coding behind them. Setup on the computer and the brick takes patience, and it can stall beginners.