When I started out with electronics I didn't really know where to look for information. Most books I stumbled upon were much too heavy on the theory of electronics and circuit design and most of the information I gathered from the web was hard to piece together to form a red line through the process of building robots and what the different electronic components did.
Then one day I happened to find David Cook's robot related site
and saw that David had published two books on how to build robots: "Robot Building for Beginners" and "Intermediate Robot Building". I read some reviews on Amazon and ordered both of the books. When the books arrived I started reading the first one aimed for beginners and soon realised that it was nothing short of amazing!
The first book didn't have any programming or micro-controllers in it. The robot described in the book was based solely on hardware logic and it was incredibly easy to build and understand how it worked. The book even showed how to use things like multimeters and breadboards - and how to machine your own robot parts if you were into that kind of thing.
The second book described the process of building another robot which was more intelligent and had some more sophisticated sensors and used a micro-controller so you could program it. This book also described how to drive motors using H-bridge constructions and motor driver chips.
All in all it was money well spent and I recommend both books to people who want to get into robot building and being able to understand and build the electronic circuits themselves .
