The LEGO Builder’s Handbook | Review

We like books here at TLCB Towers and have a growing library of titles written by members of the LEGO Community, sharing their knowledge, techniques, and sometimes even building instructions with their fellow LEGO fans.

Cue our friends at No Starch Press, whose latest title ‘The LEGO Builder’s Handbook | Become a Master Builder’ was offered to us for review. But who better to review a book about becoming a Master Builder than someone who’s attained that status already! Thus said copy was dispatched to one of our TLCB Master MOCers, the immensely talented Kyle Wigboldly (aka Thirdwigg), for a vastly more qualified appraisal than our own. Over to Kyle!

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In today’s internet centrick world, you can find any group to connect with that you need or want. We in the LEGO world can find any number of ways to connect with other builders just like us. We are constantly barraged with the specific LEGO interest sites, reviews, and purchasing options. So there is something refreshing for me about being presented with a book that may not fully connect with my specific build interest. Reading a LEGO book can be a nice way to slow down and wander along with where the author is leading you, rather than in the direction a nondescript algorithm (or TLCB Elf. Ed.) is pushing me. The LEGO Builder’s Handbook written by Deepak Shenoy is such a book to let me wander. The book was published in 2024 by No Starch Press, longtime publishing friends of the LEGO community.

The book is organized in three main parts; The Basics, Breaking Free of the Grid, and Computer Assisted Builds. While there are a number of pictures, renders, and examples, this is a text heavy book. Rather than showing lots of images of what others have built, the book focuses on teaching you how to build. It shows various ways you can expand your building techniques provided you have the parts needed. Though it is hard to define for whom this book is written.

The audience seems broad which is evident when you start with The Basics. As a LEGO builder who is squarely in the LEGO Technic area of building, this book is not directly for me. But the value started to be more clear when I started sharing the book with various children in my house and neighborhood. But ‘The LEGO Builder’s Handbook’ is not squarely directed to them as well. I found the book is at its best when experienced with a wide range of building skills. The book starts with learning the basics about building with system bricks; how do you make a strong wall, and how do you think about recreating a scale building with the correct propositions? There are skills that every good builder will need to learn to become a better one. Skills that the children in my life do not yet know. But working through the book together gave them some tools to get better. This section used building a large Empire State Building model as a throughline to demonstrate the skills being shared. I found this connection both practical and overwhelming. It was nice to see how the skills being taught could be applied to a large, and impressive building, but it was overwhelming because moving straight from learning about how to use overlapping brickwork to a three foot tall structure is a little bit of a leap.

The next section, Breaking Free of the Grid, had less of a practical/applicable gap. If you want to take your building from “thanks for showing me your creation” to “featured on The LEGO Car Blog,” working outside of the grid is the best next step a builder can make. It is in this chapter that both myself and the children in my life could connect on is the fascinating mathematical integration of the LEGO system. Stacking brick and plates, using brackets and sideways studded bricks, and half stud offset, continue to impress upon me the versatility of the LEGO system. This chapter of the book is extensive, and fascinating. A whole chapter is focused on the half stud offsets, and another on building with SNOT (studs not on top).

The final chapter, my favorite, is the chapter about angled building (so much math!) This chapter is accessible, but it is certainly not entry level. An experienced builder should be expected to know and use this information. A growing builder will need to develop into these areas, and this book gives you the tools and images to help you with this. This part of the book shines brightest.

Finally the last section of the book is about Computer Assisted Builds. I am of two minds here. One, for many people, building with LEGO is a way to get away from a screen. There is a lot of value in that (I recognise the irony of you reading this on a screen). But, I have found that taking my building in the digital space has opened up a completely different and wider world. It is through computer assisted builds that I have been able to interact with so many other LEGO builders by sharing how I build what I build. But this fact is not the driving force for this chapter. This part of the book is to share how to use the computer for mosaic building, and 3D sculptures. ‘The LEGO Builder’s Handbook’ explains the various mosaics that are possible with LEGO, and suggests a couple of softwares, but very little is given to orient the reader to the steps within the software, and the wide range of value these softwares can provide builders. Finally, the book explores 3D sculptures, and integrating them into a LEGO build using available software. These sections are interesting, although I did not connect with them as this is not the way I build. However you may find it helpful, particularly if you are interested in building large models that you are able to display somewhere.