At the suggestion of the community, and upon reading positive reviews, I recently shelled out $35 for Kicad Like a Pro, Fourth Edition. Now, $35 really isn’t all that much, but I’m a student on a tight budget, and when I compare the price of the book to that of something like, say, Beej’s Guide to Network Programming, which is free and open source, I’d like to hope that the book is going to be of an acceptable quality.
By way of disclaimer, I’ve only read up to Part 1.5 of Volume 1. I believe this represents 4 of the 15 chapters which make up Volume 1, but I’m not exactly sure because there appears to be a gap between Part 1.9 and Part 1.11. Part 1.10 doesn’t appear in the table of contents…
The portion of the book I’ve read so far has been riddled with typos, misspellings, grammatical issues, and stylistic quirks. The book’s unoptimized photos create a 250 megabyte EPUB and a 500 megabyte PDF for just the first of two volumes. I was able to reduce the 250 megabyte EPUB into a more reasonable 50 megabytes by lossily compressing photos without compromising their quality. These problems should have been caught by a technical writer who should have been paid to review the book before it was commercialized.
To be clear, all of these issues are bearable, if annoying. I do take serious issue with the very first project of the book, though: The first project is a simple LED flashlight featuring mainly through-hole components and a momentary push-button. It consists of four basic components (an LED, a resistor, a button, and a cell battery holder). Starting simple allows projects to ramp up in complexity as the reader progresses. It also means the starter project is virtually impossible to do wrong. This seems like a good decision to me. An easy, early ace helps the learning process along nicely.
However, during the schematic designing portion of this project, the author reverses the LED’s direction. The resulting circuit is broken. As I read, I wondered if the author meant to point out that the ERC could detect this kind of issue, but that wasn’t the case (apparently, the ERC doesn’t care). In fact, the author goes so far as to say, “Of course, we are working on a simple circuit, and I made no mistakes during the schematic workflow steps” during the ERC step.
In the layout design phase, some photos appear to have the LED in the incorrect orientation, as in the schematic. At some point, it’s flipped into the correct orientation, without warning or even mention to the reader.
What gives? Did I just happen to buy a new version of the book which was somehow not proofread or reviewed? I’m not sure why this book seems to have so much of the community endorsing it as a good source and I’m considering asking for a refund.