Another in the recent slew of Minecraft Books in the Dummies series, Minecraft Recipes for Dummies, Portable Edition is a lot more than just a list of crafting recipes.

This book is more like an encyclopaedia of Minecraft, because in addition to a comprehensive list of crafting recipes, there is also a detailed description of every block and item, including hints and tips on how to use them.

There’s a little section at the beginning about how to survive the first night, but this book is really aimed at players who have gotten past the first steps of the game and want to dive deeper and and learn about all the rest of the game.

As a comprehensive reference work, the main competition for this book is going to be the Minecraft Wiki. The Wiki is sometimes hard to read, as not all of the contributors are good writers and not all of the information is useful (that’s why I started Minecraft 101!). The authors of this book—a father and son team—write clearly, and so in many cases this book is a lot easier to understand than the Wiki! As with the other books in this series the pictures are all in colour and well reproduced.

One thing worth noting is that, in addition to the PC version of the game, this book also covers the things you can craft on other platforms, such as Minecraft PE and the Raspberry Pi version. This makes the book especially valuable for those who play on more than one type of device.

While the book will suffer the fate of all all books and eventually go out of date, right now it’s up to speed with the new blocks and recipes from Minecraft 1.8 so it will be mostly accurate for a good long time.

This book is an excellent Minecraft reference and makes a good alternative to the Minecraft Wiki for people who want a comprehensive resource that is a little bit less nerdy and easier to read.

Minecraft Recipes For Dummies, Portable Edition
by Jesse Stay, Thomas Stay
Wiley, 224pp