This book provides a wide range of information. However, I didn't feel like the book provided even depth of information that would assist the reader in avoiding pit falls. In fact I felt like the book was a little haphazardly organized and I didn't feel like the book really promoted techniques that might be considered in high quality work.
This book has a lot of great color images which is probably why the book caught my eye as a young woodworker. However, I feel like I was exactly the type of unaware person that the publisher target this book towards (being that I bought this book a long time ago before Amazon and readily available book reviews).
I do think this book would be found useful for a particular type of person. Such a person would primarily be interested in building their own furniture that would match the quality of what they could purchase in a store. Further, this book would primarily be useful for someone with some background in woodworking as I noticed some basic details were often omitted.
The book does provide some suggestions on which tools to purchase as well as which features to be aware of for various tools. Further, the book is fairly well balance between the use of hand tools and power tools. However, the advice is focused towards the purchase of new tools where in the hand tool world some might disagree with the recommendation to purchase some of the new tools that are on the market and instead purchase used versions.
I purchased this book roughly 10 years ago since a few of the projects caught my eye, however, one project in particular did not stand the test of time mainly due to the fact that the design did not account for seasonal wood movement. Reading through this book after building a basic understanding of wood movement I noticed the lack of consideration for wood movement through out this book.
Pages: 256 Publisher: Hermes House (printed in China) ISBN-13: 978-1843-092087