“It’s everything to fix anything.”
Download the Ebook
The Art Of Troubleshooting – ebook – 2023-10-15 (PDF, 78 MB, 399 pages)
Read Individual Chapters Online
Table of Contents
Introductions | Strategies | Virtues | Cleaning Up
The links above will take you to the all-inclusive table of contents, or to lists of articles grouped by the book’s main subject areas: Introductions, Strategies, Virtues, and Cleaning Up.
Overview
Ready for a well-rounded fix-it education? Then it’s time to read The Art Of Troubleshooting book, a powerful and comprehensive treatise on how to repair things.
Combining theory and practice, you’ll gain insight into the principles that underlie the diagnosis and repair of all machines. Explore the entire ecosystem of fixing things, including economics, psychology, and preventing future malfunctions by learning from current ones. Extremely practical too, you’ll benefit from an entire section devoted to the bread-and-butter strategies that get you from “broken” to “fixed” in the shortest time possible. Finally, The Art Of Troubleshooting focuses on you. Understand the mindset and behaviors that can make anyone a truly powerful master of repair. Whether at home or at work, be the hero and save the day by getting things running again!
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Reviews
- “I found his book well worth the read as a source of quality food for thought as well as specific techniques to improve your mental problem solving processes.” — Michael Graham, EngineerDog
- “A useful, entertaining and unusual guide that turns troubleshooting into an art form.” — Kirkus Reviews
- “Maxham’s expertise is broad, and his book equips problem solvers across a variety of disciplines.” — Foreword Reviews
- “…this is not just a book about DIY, but a book about self-improvement and awareness.” — Self-Publishing Review
- “The Art of Troubleshooting provides the exact and necessary amount of balance between technique, technology, mathematical proof, simple and clear explanation without condescension, and all with tension-relieving humor.” — Portland Book Review
- “The author is extremely positive and supportive in the reader’s journey to become a better troubleshooter…” — San Francisco Book Review
- “…Maxham delivers an informative and enjoyable manual.” — BlueInk Review
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THE ART OF TROUBLESHOOTING 
Excellent read. I’m an A&P and work as a certified professional logistician (Maintenance engineering) for The Boeing Company. I had a short course in troubleshooting in college which was helpful, but not in-depth. I tend to solve the easy stuff first (like what I’m going to have for lunch). The successes then motivate me to tackle the much harder stuff. This was an eye opener. Thanks!
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I’m with the others above in spirit! I too like hard copies so I can more easily ruminate on the material. Thank you for making the electronic version available though! I am an aviation mechanic, (A&P), and topics related to this are fundamentally important to us. I think rather than dealing with specifics in our schooling, more emphasis should be placed on the bigger picture about troubleshooting. I was a psychology major in my undergraduate, so the principles of recognizing bias & pre-conceptions are a large part of being an able troubleshooter as well! – Clarence Clayton
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I really like this. Add my vote for another release of printed copies!
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Thanks
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Wow, a lot of useful information in this book! I flipped thru it to gain a fresh, additional perspective on how to approach different types of problems. I am generally the person everybody turns to when it comes to troubleshooting problems at work. This book could certainly be described as a thorough and well organized reference. It is not too complex for a beginner, while still being intensely detailed for the more advanced troubleshooter. Thank you for the free download!
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You’re welcome, Dave!
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Great book! You should release it as a not-so-pricey kindle book. I’ve been looking into this subject in order to train staff and there isn’t much out there on the fundamentals. It was especially good to see a chapter on interviewing people and collecting information from them as in cross team outages technicians from different areas often had trouble getting to the cause without some guidance.
NLP I wasn’t familiar with (and wiki doesn’t have wonderful things to say about it) but reminding people that communications syntax can be important and why was very helpful.
One topic that seems odd in it’s absence was the idea of separating “Incidents” from “Problems” in the ITIL sense. I realise that this isn’t just about Info-tech but as part of the process it can be important in some situations to separate service recovery from root cause analysis in the interest of reducing downtime. (just a thought anyway).
A dive into economics of repair vs replace was a breath of fresh air too!
Thank you for this book!
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You’re welcome and thanks for the feedback, Paul!
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Thanks for the quick response! I’m a mechanical engineer and I like to have hard copies of books. I found yours on Amazon but just couldn’t justify paying $500. I appreciate you offering the ebook for free, but will there be more print editions in the future that might be available for a lower price?
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If there’s sufficient demand, I may put together an updated print edition. Thanks for letting me know you want it!
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I would definitely pay a fair price for a hard copy. I know that ebooks are getting more common these days, but I think that reference material is especially handy to have a hard copy of. I would imagine other people feel the same with this type of material. Some companies may even buy a batch. I know my company would at least buy 1 copy for their little on site library, and I’d buy one for myself. Anyways, thanks for the great information. I’ve been reading the ebook and am enjoying it.
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Jason,
Is this free ebook the same material as is being sold on Amazon for $500? If so, why is it selling on Amazon for $500?
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The copies of The Art Of Troubleshooting you are seeing on Amazon, sometimes offered for big $$$, are used copies of the first printed edition. These are being sold by independent dealers and so I don’t have any control over the pricing.
The version you can read here is better because I’ve fixed a lot of typos since that first edition. And, it’s free!
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