Review: Good but not great - 3.75 stars
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 12, 2014
OK, the first part of the book is good.  It goes over creating the building itself and it's pretty well described and easy to do.  After that, it has problems.I'm no Minecraft expert, but I've logged quite a few hours playing.  My kids, though, have put in many hundreds of hours I'm sure.  The first chapter about the redstone door looked easy enough, but he only has 5 steps with screenshots, and they don't add up going from one to the next.  In addition, it's not clearly explained how he got from one step to another, leaving the reader to guess a lot.  Redstone can be tricky, and I followed his instructions as best I could, but I could not get the front door to work.  My kids (who are Minecraft maniacs and well-versed with redstone) could not figure it out either.  They said that the instructions for the door were unclear and confusing.After a couple of hours (literally) of trying different things I got so frustrated that I gave up.  I'll try to find a good tutorial on YouTube that explains it much better.  I wish more detail could have gone into this to prevent a lot of headaches.  Still, the first part of the book is good and I like where the book is going (with how to finish the fortress), so I'll definitely rate this positively overall.