I normally like Lonely Planet books. But this one is plain awful.
The biggest failing is that it has no information -- at least that I could find -- on the Great Wall sites near the city. There is a long section on a place called Shanhaiguan where the Wall meets the sea, but it's about 300 km from Beijing. I guess there are a few places closer to Beijing where you can see the wall but the author decided that it wouldn't be helpful to discuss the places where tourists might actually go.
The book is poorly laid out, and the Chinese characters and accented English transliterations may work in a physical book. But on the Kindle, they don't work at all -- they break up the page but what's worse, they are hard to read.
Here's a more general complaint about Lonely Planet guides on Kindle -- the maps. They are hard to read, hard to navigate around and even in zoom view, they don't work.
Having bought this guide, I am now going to go out and get the Frommers guide or another guide to Beijing so I can more usefully plan my trip. Too bad though that I had to waste the money and my time going through this one.