These days doing a chart using a PC is not difficult, but suppose you know some approximate information about someone and you want to find out their likely tendencies based on planetary positions in an instant? This book enables just that. Complicated ephemeris books are a hassle, expensive and difficult to get hold of, especially if you are not an astrologer. About a half of this book is taken up as a very simple ephemeris which shows where all the important planets are from around 1900 to 2000. The layout is simple and huge amounts of data are compressed into user friendly pages. The book provides a basic overview of what planetary positions mean, and then it does personality assessments of all the planets through all the signs - especially the important planets from the Sun to Saturn. It does not go into detail about houses and the ascendant because it is a rough guide to a rough chart. This is often all you may want to know, and at this level very useful. Just to find someone's moon sign is a revealation. The personality profiles for each planet in each sign of an essay on one page and a chart on the other showing negative and positive traits of the placement and how they can be interchanged is once again reader friendly and the book has interesting diagrams and icons (these are not in-depth for generational extra Saturn planets). Altogether a simple, vibrant and very informative book that is like a magnifying glass into the first few stages of astrological analysis based on planets in signs.