Through a series of interviews, this book covers the rise of a new phenomenon: the maker movement. As the back cover states:

What do you get when you combine an electronics hobbyist, hacker, garage mechanic, kitchen table inventor, tinkerer, and entrepreneur? A “maker,” of course.

One might expect that with the ever-increasing move toward virtualization, real-world tinkering would have lost its momentum. The opposite is true, with many people enthusiastically reinventing themselves as makers. The author correctly points out that makers themselves are nothing new. In fact, the world was full of makers even before the Industrial Revolution, yet the current wave of people who love to tinker around with hardware, as opposed to intangible apps, is something of a new breed.

The author writes that he himself has a passion for making things. He expresses the hope that through interviews with leading makers, he can inspire other people to catch the maker bug. This passion clearly shines through during the interviews, which often turn into conversations between two people who share the same fascination for physically creating something new and cool.

Interviews were conducted with people such as the makers of Raspberry Pi, SparkFun, Adafruit, and Digispark. The backgrounds of the interviewees are different yet similar: often they were not the cool kids in school, while nowadays they have certainly made up for it.

Through his trips down memory lane, the author inspires, educates, and often makes you smile. The format of having 22 interviews back-to-back invites a piecemeal approach, which allows readers to think about each interviewee. The book was surprisingly refreshing and thoughtful, and while it won’t make the reader into a maker, it is highly effective in convincing the reader to pick up that soldering iron again. Many other popular titles also reprise this topic [1,2] and are worth considering.

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