Workshop

Wood Magazine: How to Build a Great Home Workshop
$19.95
One the plus side, this book details a lot of projects to improve one's shop- complete with cut list and details on assembly. If your woodworking goals are to build IKEA like furnishings for your shop, then this book might be great. I much prefer the Taunton books that provide advice but also showcase really well made and thought out projects.

Setting Up Shop: The Practical Guide to Designing and Building Your Dream Shop
$21.95
I found a lot of good ideas in this book. I am picking up woodworking and am building my shop. This book gives many examples of furniture shops and workplaces. You can easily adapt the tips to your space. The photos are interesting and informative, and the author talks a lot about how to make your life easier by setting your tools up in the right way and putting what you need at your finger tips.
May be boring for someone who is a professional woodworker.

How to Run Seminars & Workshops: Presentation Skills for Consultants, Trainers and Teachers
$21.95
If you're NOT a professional trainer and you have to present at a conference or facilitate a workshop, this book will get you started. If you are a professional trainer looking for new ideas and methods to improve your skills and stay current, keep looking!

I was disappointed in this book. I have been a corporate trainer in both the financial and healthcare technology fields for over 16 years and I found Mr. Jolles book on the topic to be rather stale and outdated. He does have a few basic, nuts-and-bolts tips that would be of value to a novice, but this is not a source for the professional trainer. Most of his book speaks to stand-up, classroom model training when a significant portion of adult, workplace learning is moving to both synchronous and asynchronous distance learning. He has very little to say about the use of technology in training and what he does have to say is really not helpful. One part I even found comical.... he advises that to focus a projector so that the top and bottom are evenly focused when projecting from a unit that is below the screen, you should tape the bottom of the screen to the wall behind it. The problem he is talking about is called "keystoning" and most projectors today have a keystone correction feature that allows you to adjust for rectangular distortion right on the projector itself. Keystone correction has been widely available on most projectors for years, so this is nothing new.

Workshop
$16.00
My 2 1/2 year old loves (adores, really) this book. Each double-page spread shows both a specific tool (hammer, drill, shears, etc) and the progression of building an old-fashioned carousel. The pictures are really gorgeous, with lots of detail, and very stylized.

But the text. Oh, the text. The review calls it "poetry." Um, no. Not by a long shot. Not even close. It's quite possibly the worst attempt at personification I've ever read. It's painful to read, and neither I nor my husband can read it without cracking up. Most of the time we skip the text and just talk about the pictures.

It really is a beautiful book, so it's a shame the writing doesn't match the quality of the illustrations.