I am fairly new to robotics and wanted to start with a structured project that would teach me some of the electronics and hardware issues (I have done software for most of my professional life). I decided to use "Robot Building for Beginners" by David Cook. This is a very thorough book that goes into a lot of detail about each step in the process and gives an introduction to the standard components used in constructing a robot. At the end, the reader will end up with a line-following robot named Sandwich.

I spent the last few weeks setting up my workspace and buying the necessary tools and parts -- I was really starting from nothing. I used to work in a physics laboratory when I got my Ph.D. but I don't have any of that stuff at home! The book is very specific in giving suppliers, which is good. I found that Jameco was the easiest for me to use...you can search for the parts on the website, as every supplier lets you do, but they also link to the PDF of the paper catalong where that part is found. And that tends to be much more understandable, better images, more details, usefully if you are not sure exactly what you want.

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