As far as machinist books go, this one is pretty good. Well-organized, fairly well-written, reasonably complete.

This book presents itself as a textbook, and no doubt is used as one. Objectives and summaries bookend each chapter, and there are plenty of unchallenging "this will be on the test" questions.

It is as a textbook that this book fails, and it took some reflection for me to determine why. Forget for the moment those schoolbooks used in high schools and introductory (101) college courses - those are mere surveys, overviews of a broad subject that have no place outside of preparation for standardized testing.

A textbook should provide a framework for thinking about or solving a problem. The mark of a good textbook is that the mental tools it develops can be applied to unrelated subjects: that style of learning known as synthesis which appears to have fallen out of favor the past couple of decades.

The author of this book seems to grasp this at an intuitive level, for attempts are made to provide such a framework - but it amounts to merely a handful of tips. Measure multiple times and average. Measure from both ends. Keep everything clean. There's not a lot of insight here.

There is, however, quite a lot of information on measuring tools used by machinists. What they are for, how they work, when to use each one, and so on. It's a good book, and at 200 pages it would be an excellent book. It just reaches too far. ( )