Patrick Chase
This is probably mostly targeted at Steve and David...

I'm considering getting the Whelan book on wooden plane making ("Making Traditional Wooden Planes") and am wondering how it's stood the test of time and if that's still a good starting point?

WC's search function seems to be broken (the error dump points to an endian-ness bug of all things) but by searcing for 'john+whelan+site:woodcentral.com' I found Steve's 2013 thread about his first non-laminated plane, that seems to reference Whelan as authoritative. I've also found the thread where Steve pointed out a copyright violation :-).