Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance: The World's Best-Selling Bicycle Repair and Maintenance Guide Paperback – July 7, 2023

Update 7-2-2018: First, before reading my review of this book you need a little perspective on the review writer. I was a total novice who could not have pointed to a cog or a chaining on my very own bike. It is amazing to me that any book could lift me out of bicycle ignorance and place me solidly on a path to knowing my bike.My goal of becoming knowledgeable about my 23-speed Tommaso road bike is too much for my old brain to grasp quickly so I’m finding this well organized, well-illustrated collection of road bike know-how to be a near-perfect resource for me.So far, after a quick scan of this impressive paperback, I have found two gold nuggets. One is the section called PRERIDE INSPECTION in the chapter named BASIC STUFF (Ch. 2) in which 16 steps are provided for making sure your road bike is road ready before heading out for that long trail ride. The second is the entire chapter 5, which is titled CABLE-ACTUATED SHIFTING SYSTEMS. Knowing how to adjust the shifting system for optimal performance is almost as critical to me as braking but far more mysterious.After having studied just these two sections of the book, it is clear to me this book is a real find and an excellent value (at just over ten bucks) for anyone using a bike with cable-actuated gearing.---original review---I am starting my rating at three stars even though it has not arrived yet because I am disappointed that it is not available in digital form. Digital format facilitates searches, and I anticipate searching for terms a lot in this book. Digital also facilitates readers with vision issues. But after the resoundingly positive reviews, I look forward to making this the center piece of my new bike repair library.

This is a well written handbook with great pictures. It helps describe basic tasks so I can do them. And it helps me speak the language at the bike shop when I decide I don’t want to do my own repair.

All I can say is wow, this guy knows his stuff when it comes to bikes. Helped immensely with my overhaul on an old bike so I could get back into riding my bike. I literally tore my old bike down piece by piece, cleaned and repaired what I could and replaced many parts that had too much wear. This book has so much detail and great pictures that I didn’t have any stress at all during the rebuild. Used to be stressed working on a bike but this book answered any question I could have had without having to consult a bicycle mechanic. Without it I could have never successfully ordered the right parts the first try. Actually has more info than I could even need.

This book is great, however I meant to buy the latest edition (6th at the time of this review) for guidance with the latest electronic shifting information. Most of the rest of the book (5th edition) is sufficiently up-to-date to help with any age of road or gravel bike.

Only spent a couple of hours looking at it so far. Lots of material, surprisingly, they include comprehensive instructions on wheel building, the complete process for multiple type of lace ups. Nice surprise. My main interest was looking at intermediate maintenance like overhauling head sets, bottom brackets and gear and brake adjustment. This book seems to cover just about everything from basic to modern bikes. They explain very well, for example, the multiple types of headsets. I have four bicycles, spanning 1988 to 2012. I highly recommend this book. Great value. If i may add, i tend ti like paper books vs internet. I can flip through pages back and forth.

This is an excellent book with its many and beautiful exploded drawings of the different mechanisms in a bicycle, and the high quality, well-written text descriptions of these mechanisms and how to properly service them. I find that Zinn is better than the Big Blue Book when you need to get good exploded drawings and text descriptions. The paper binding is far superior to the Blue Book. The coverage of road bicycles and their components is overall of excellent quality. Some things I would like to see in this book: new editions every 2 years. There could be coverage of "gravel bikes" for example. A chapter on the differences between low-end bicycles, mid-range bicycles, and high-end bicycles. A video series similar to the Park Tool series on bike maintenance and repair which could perhaps reference chapters in the book.

I have borrowed a previous edition of this book from my public library several times over the past year. I was waiting for the newest edition (5th) to be released before buying my very own. I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to any sort of bike repair/maintenance. I have been able to learn some basic maintenance skills to cut down on trips to my local bike shop. The book describes the basic tools one should have for their own use and seeing as it has been a little bit of buying a tool only when absolutely needed, I can stay within my budget. This book is easy to use and organized so that it's fairly simple to find exactly what you're looking for. It's instructions are clear and the illustrations are quite helpful. If I use this in conjunction with some of the instruction videos found on YouTube, it helps me to feel more confident in gradually improving my mechanic skills.

Love it! Explained disc brake setup and care very basic.