In order to fit all these examples in one book the amount of description for each item is rather brief.<br><br>The other book I ordered, "507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices (Dover Science Books)" has much better descriptions.  A few items in that book are still a bit brief, but overall it's a better book.<br><br>edit to add:<br><br>Getting further into the book, there are a lot of simple devices do ok with the short descriptions, it's mainly any more complicated device that suffers.  You might have a single small cross section of an entire machine with a two sentence description.