Metal Detecting: A Beginner's Guide: to Mastering the Greatest Hobby In the World

This book is a must-have for every beginner. As someone just getting into the scene, this book was extremely helpful and very detail oriented. I loved the big font and easy layout of the book too! I didn't realize how small some of the text was in other books I've been reading until I picked this up and realized how much easier it was on my eyes. The formatting on this book was just incredible - it's part of the reason it was so easy to get through the abundance of information. Learning the lingo from this book has been so much more helpful then I ever thought possible. I loved all the pictures in the book but particularly loved the ones that helped show the direction of the water when explaining what to look for when it comes to water flow. Fantastic! The diagrams and photos made it extremely easy to visual all the text they accompanied! Great book - highly recommended for beginners.

OK I have given this 4 stars because it is an easy read and the author was full of enthusiasm and would make a good coach for Detecting Camp if there is such a thing. He also included information about the best types of detectors for different types of detecting. I learned about probing, something I had not heard of before. The electrolysis portion was informative. The detecting rivers had some good tips. The Jewelry, preserving your relics and selling your finds information was helpful. The join the community links and links for research were cool too. If this book had been half the price It would have gotten 5 stars. It was informative but read more like an adventure novel instead of a guide to metal detecting. I am a beginner, If you have been doing longer than a year then this probably would not teach you much that you have not learned from your experience except maybe the Probing part, now that takes skill....

My boyfriend wanted to try metal detecting, but he kept getting lost in the internet and the multiple conflicting sources. So I bought him this book and it’s wonderful for beginners like us! This book is a great introduction to metal detecting! It provided so much information. One of my favorite parts of the book was the simple definitions of the lingo. There were so many things I learned about just from this one chapter! The book also provided details of different kinds of metal detectors, from different brands to different uses for metal detectors. The book moves into where you should be metal detecting, the laws of property, to identifying your treasures to cleaning! It’s really a wonderful book, especially for a beginner.

Very Interesting!!! Enjoyed the book a lot. I still need to buy my Metal Detector, but i am ready now.

This is a great book for beginners. It's easy to read regardless of your level of technical expertise, and the relaxed way it's written conveys the information without being intimidating. As an engineer with a basic theoretical understanding of how metal detectors work I found the technical descriptions to be on the simple side, though accurate enough for the target audience. As a complete novice to the practical aspects of finding and digging up metal objects, however, I found the book very helpful. My metal detector arrived shortly after I finished reading this book and I found the techniques and suggestions I'd read to be practical and useful. There are some minor grammatical and spelling errors, but not enough to detract from the book's content. I might have deducted a star for its short length if I'd gotten the dead-tree edition, but at the Kindle price I thought it was worth every penny.

This reads like a self published book, with some simple edit errors throughout the book. The diagrams and drawings are VERY simplistic, and the font is something like 12 or 14 point, so out of a "217" page manuscript, you can probably consider it more like 100 real world pages. That being said, the book produces as advertised. It is a very basic guide for beginners. I, being one of those, found the book to be good for basic understanding and getting the lingo, and general feel of the hobby. If I had 2 gripes it would be these: 1) the author users the term "treasure," both appropriately and inappropriately so much, I began to cringe every time he used it. 2) due to the general nature of the book, not too many specifics can be described, especially to settings on the detector; every detector is different, so author cannot focus on just one... finding a way to add more detail, especially in the discriminate, sensitivity and threshold areas (what it does, how it does it, effects of low and high settings, etc.) would flesh out the book a little more. There are also plenty more definitions out there... Anyway, good beginners book, but could be more...

I bought this because of the rave reviews to get it. I used to to purchase exactly the type of metal detector I needed, or rather what would fit my needs. I loved the review of all the various types. I then purchased one from amazon, but within an hour canceled it because I learned metal detecting is illegal in my state of Wisconsin. Even though I am on the border of Illinois, I didn't want to be squeamish every time I tried to use it. So from what I saw of the beginning of this book, it was full of valuable information. It's just upsetting that I can't use it while living where I do.

I've bought 3 detectors now... 1 for my brother and 2 for me. While I wouldn't say I'm disappointed with my purchases, I MIGHT have done things differently if I had read this first. I usually research any meaningful purchase on the internet - product reviews such as here on Amazon, forum posts, etc. Literally, whatever I can find... that's the issue, sometimes you don't know what it is that you don't know. Meaning you don't have enough info to ask, or search for, the right questions. Mark's book is a quick read and filled with really good information. A lot of it can be found on the internet -- IF you knew what to look for, but being new to the hobby, I didn't. This book taught me a lot. Also if you're going to do any beach hunting, you need to read this, and Mark's other book "Metal Detecting the Beach" - especially if you're going to do salt water. Of the 3 detector's I purchased, only 1 is really suitable for salt water beaches. I didn't know. There's more to this than I thought. Thanks, Mark, for the education!