+1. The availability of so many viewpoints & assumption levels makes videos far better, though some like to waste 10 minutes presenting 1 minute of info. FWIW that 70s reader's digest one still pops up for sale on occasion, much of it very out of date but some is still good. IIRC it includes how to change a gramophone idler wheel & zero risk assessments.
Grew up with the Readers Digest one, which we still have somewhere.
What might be more useful these days is an overview book - it might not tell you exactly how to do a specific job, but sets out the basic principles and the options - you could do A or B or C, which have the following benefits and tradeoffs. Then you can go and look up a video or products for doing C when you've decided that's what you want. It would save time googling around, finding a vendor of B that omits to mention A and C, all the sites on A are talking about the USA, etc.
The wiki is pretty good for that though :)
Theo
PS. I spotted a wiki knockoff the other day that doesn't have the right licence:
With a printed DIY manual it's often like the Haynes manuals for car mechanics where you need a translation.
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With a decent Youtube video, especially from a professional or company demonstrating the a product, you get real world instructions. Obviously common sense must be applied to weed out the crap and to realise that perfectly vertical walls, 90 degree corners and level ceilings shown in demonstrations usually don't exist in older properties.
Is my memory playing tricks or did one vintage of this manual show you how cover a panelled interior door with plywood (or quite possibly hardboard), while a later vintage told you how to restore a door that had had such an atrocity perpetrated on it?
You can if you are blind.I despair on the computer sort your own computer problems one with as you can see on this screen simply click on...... Same goes for diy, but the older books tended to have descriptive words not just pictures, so you could scan them and get the basic idea, now, no way.
I leafed through a 1970s reader's digest diy manual late last year. It surprised me how much of it was truly out of date, and how plainly dangerous some of the advice was.
Slightly before my time but I believe that was down to a DIY expert on a TV program of the time. My parents having purchased their first house covered all doors with hardboard and boxed in the stairs with the same. It was the "modern" 60s look.
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