acknowledgments

The book you hold in your hands is the result of more than a year of hard work, and I would never have completed writing it without the help of many others. First, I’d like to thank Fay Rhodes and Jim Kelly for introducing me to book writing. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to coauthor LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT One-Kit Wonders with them in 2008, I might never have considered writing my own book, especially in a language that is not my native tongue.

Next, I’d like to thank the LDraw community for developing many tools required to make clear building instructions, especially Philippe Hurbain for making detailed 3D drawings of the NXT set components; Travis Cobbs for developing LDView to visualize the building steps; and Kevin Clague for developing LPUB4, which allowed me to organize my building instructions in a way that would make them easy to follow. Thanks too to John Hansen for letting me use his tool to take screenshots of the NXT display.

Thanks also to all who have been directly involved in this book: Richard Li and Martijn Boogaarts for carefully testing my robots and their building instructions; Jochem de Klerk for taking the cover photograph; Micah Edelblut for taking the photographs used in Figure 9-4, Figure 10-1, and Figure 10-16; my parents for their advice on how to manage working on this book; and Xander Soldaat for proofreading the book for technical accuracy. Special thanks go to technical editor Damien Kee for reading all of the chapters early on to make sure they were understandable and clear.

Further, many thanks go to the people at No Starch Press, who have been wonderful colleagues in the past year. I especially thank William Pollock for converting the text in this book into clear and smooth English and for his constructive criticism to make every section in this book useful and worth reading. I also thank Riley Hoffman for managing this project and for making all the pages in this book look as good as they do.

Thanks to everyone else who supported me while I worked on this book. My friends and the NXT builders eagerly awaiting the publication of this book encouraged me to complete this book and kept me going until it was finished.

Finally, thanks to the LEGO company for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, the wonderful product on which this book is based. Not only is the NXT fun to play with, but it brings people all over the world together who otherwise might never have met.