Designed as the companion book to MAKE's Getting Started with Soldering Kit, this book teaches you the fundamentals of soldering: preheating and tinning your iron, using helping hands to hold components in place, making a good solder joint, and desoldering cleanly (for when things didn't go right the first time). With the tools in the kit, and MAKE's Learn to Solder Skill Badge, you'll be able to practice your soldering while making a fun wearable badge that shows the world you just learned a new skill.
Not a total waste of time but definitely just about the same as finding a website or YouTube video to watch. The pictures aren’t that great. It feels like they made a manual to go with the Makey Robot Badge and then got really excited and decided to capitalize on it. Glad I read the library’s copy and didn’t buy it.
If you Don’t know anything about soldering, this is the place to start. Succinct, easy for a kid to understand, and a good primer on the topic. I thought it was nicely done and presented well.
As a beginner, this is useless. As other people have mentioned, go to youtube and watch videos.
The book is too short to be of any value. There were 2 pictures of a good joint and 2 pictures of a bad joint. 2 pages on how to fix your mistakes. It told us to bend the wires to help objects, like the led light, stay in place. It then told us to cut wires using the wire cutter. One helpful thing it said was to make sure you put the wires in the right hole.
A number of pages described other projects you can build. I felt like I bought and was reading an advertisement.