This book is certainly comprehensive... it covers the expected range of genealogy topics, from vital records to selecting technology tools and planning a genealogy research trip.
But, for all the value that thorough and linear thinking has in the field of genealogy research, Morgan's writing style is unnecessarily tedious. For example, when talking about pedigree charts, he describes how you write your own name on line number one, then actually goes out of the way to explain to us that "the next pair of lines is numbered 2 and 3" before describing to us what these next lines are all about. And though he does devote some text to technology, this is discussed mostly in separate chapters at the end and he fails to incorporate as a central theme the role technology can play in alleviating the tedium of research.
In short, this book could have been written in half as many pages without losing much on substance. It's definitely not the kind of book you can read from cover-to-cover, even chapter-by-chapter. I found the Genealogy Handbook by Ellen Galford to be a much better starting point. However, given the comprehensiveness of this book and its decent index, this book still maintains some value as a reference.
