Oh boy! Many of the ROS books out there are (at most) twenty percent useful information and eighty percent filler material. Let me tell you about it. No really, I am going to tell you about it.
Most of these books are garbage because:
The first problem I have is they go over the easier stuff from http://wiki.ros.org/ without hitting the hard to do stuff. Many of these books waste the first two chapters on how to install ROS and how to do the wonderful turtlesim demo. Not that installation is the most simple thing to memorize, but the instructions are there on the download pages. The turtlesim demo is much better done on the wiki page than in any book I have found. Here is the link to that: http://wiki.ros.org/turtlesim . Many books like to also throw in the what is ROS in the first pages of the book. This seems like it carries over from some third grade lessons on how to write a paper. I think this is equivalent of writing a book on how to drive a car, and start the book off with what Webster's dictionary or how the law defines a car and then tell a car's many uses; no one cares and it is already understood by the audience.
Next they assume you will be using thousands of dollars on a single component. It seems to me that most people who would be using this may be college students, not members of the robotics department faculty or Darpa. I think there are many who would use those devices, but they probably already have an idea on how to use ROS or can build a program to make their robot do what they want. This limits who can follow the book and makes the book worthless. It has a feel that the author(s) is/are out of touch with the audience and tries to escape this by showing a picture of an arduino. Somehow there should be a mix of high dollar and affordable equipment examples so every one can play.
Damn their decisions on the ordering of what you should learn next. All of the books suffer from the how to install and turtlebot demos, but few get the following chapters in a logical order. I understand why they set the first chapters as the brain-deadist things you can do, but the following chapters seem to go in their own chaotic random directions. I imagine that the most logical order would be:
Now the blanket sin of the ROS how to books: Wasted space. I hate this the most. It goes along with the showing a picture of an arduino, a PR2 robot, or high dollar sensors, and the copy/paste of the wiki issues that was earlier mentioned. The worst wasted space is done with the "this is how you code" sections. These sections will waste a page or more on just showing some simple code that they have available on a website and then waste more space by breaking down the code and explaining it. If you think it is important to put your fancy code in your book, couldn't you write comments in the lines to explain how it works? Or maybe you could change the name of your book to "insert old book name here"+" and how the short codes I wrote work." There are also screen shots taken of almost every thing they tell you to try.
Now, If you want some good examples of how to do a how-to for ROS, check out:
3/12/17