The New Weapons of the World Encyclopedia: An International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to the 21st Century

I bought this book knowing some basic principles of war as the weapon lover and collectionist i am. This books is written without fancy details, laconic, it just tells you what you need to know. For people who are starting or that know little about warfare and weapon systems this book is a treasure. I highly recommend it.

Shipment arrived quickly. I bought this for my 18 year old son for Christmas. He loves all weapons (he calls them tools) from all ages in history and is very knowledgeable about the details. He sat and read the book cover to cover and said that it was a pretty good book.

This is the third edition of "Weapons" from the Diagram Group. Taken on its own it is very good; a rare, possibly unique work among references on arms; it is organized by function rather than era, region, or alphabetically. Accordingly, you'll see a current police baton on the same page as a several thousand year old club. The functions begin with arming the hand (a rock, for example) and proceeds (more or less) by complexity, ending with aircraft, missiles, nukes, etc.Without a doubt, there are better works on weapons of an individual era, or specific classes of weapons, but there is no better survey or overview of weapons. The omissions that I noticed were extremely rare (and dead-end) technologies that even soi-disant experts might be ignorant of. True, not every rifle ever manufactured is mentioned, but every major operating principle is. On the other hand, it included some little-known and exotic arms that illustrated major principles, for example, the 13mm air rifle that was used by the Austrians during the Napoleonic wars. Exotic, but not included because it is exotic, included to illustrate the principles of projectile weapons that use compressed gas as propellant (rather than a chemical reaction).But as a "third edition" it leaves much to be desired. The basic work from 1980 is reprinted in its entirety, with two blocks of content added in the two following editions. This wasn't too bad in the second edition, published in the 1990s, but in this one, it creates the appearance that Diagram Group was just coming back to a money maker without applying the same standards of production used in the first one. This could be fixed by revising the small arms section to include rifles, pistols, and machine guns developed in the past ten years, rather than throwing recent developments in the a pile at the end. The practice of merely lumping new material in the sections at the end of the book also defeats the purpose of a reference organized by function rather than time period, detracting from what makes this work most useful and interesting.For what it is, a survey of tools of violence, "Weapons" is without equal. The organization makes it very accessible and easy to use, despite the editorial decisions in this third edition. Throughout, the authors write in such a was as to educate without a condesending or arrogant tone. I still can't recommend it highly enough.E.M. Van Court

This book is not offset printed with the duo-tone images (blue and black, sepia and black, etc.). Instead they take a scan or PDF of the book and print it out so the paper quality is that of your typical home laser printer and the quality of the images also suffer from the "copy of a copy of a copy" nature of using a scanned image.I wish this (the print on demand quality) was made clearer. I was hoping for the version I stared at for hours in my youth. I'm headed to ebay for a used copy of the offset printed original.

This book is obviously the best weapon(s) book encyclopedia you can get. I mean the bibliography contains well-written info on all the weapons we man have created with well-drawn diagrams from prehistoric to modern times. I recommend this to anyone whether they're a weapons enthusiast or a history buff.

One of the best books on weapons. I remember reading the 2nd edition of this book back when I was in 8th grade at the school library and when I found out that they updated it a third time I had to buy it.

This book breaks down complex concepts into an easy to understand format. I had several of the older edition years ago and in the time since then I have yet to find a single book with more comprehensive descriptions of the weapons inside.

This is a gift for someone and I just glanced through it for a bit. I know someone who will be very happy with this Christmas present! Great pictures with wonderful ways to describe the weapons. This is good for kids and adults alike!