My biggest complaint: you can't always tell what's "selected" from the images in the book. It's difficult to tell the difference between selected and unselected edges in the wireframe views. Also, some of the pages aren't fully inked, and the images on those pages aren't at all helpful. However, the DVD contains hi-rez, full-color versions. Either I never knew that or I forgot by the time I got to chapter ten, because I couldn't follow the penguin tutorial with the book images. Having discovered the DVD images, I'll re-read that chapter.
Also of value on the DVD, the videos extend the tutorials in the book. They aren't just a recap of the book tutorials; they're additional content, and they're quite good. There's so much video content, in fact, he couldn't fit it all on the DVD. There's additional free material on the author's website, though. As of August 2007 there are no videos available for chapters 15 and 16, though the chapter 14 video seems to indicate that there are. Also, there are objects and scenes missing from the DVD that are supposed to be used in the chapters 15 and 16 tutorials.
For many of the chapters I felt the book tutorials didn't go far enough, like they had ended too soon. The videos are necessary to continue the tutorial. While I gave credit for this additional material above, this is also a drawback to this book. I bought a book because I like that format. The videos are nice, but I prefer printed tutorials. As the book is already a hefty 700 pages, I'll just have to conclude that LightWave tutorials of this depth just don't fit in one book.
Also of note, this is very much a learn-by-example book. It is comprised almost entirely of tutorials. Remember that you have LightWave's manual as a reference, and Mr. Ablan reminds you of that throughout this book.
LightWave is a very deep program and this book doesn't cover every option available. It does cover a great deal of material, though. You'll get more than just a taste of what the program can do. The tutorials are easy to follow, and perhaps credit to the LightWave program itself, when Mr. Ablan tells you to do something you've done before, without explaining it again, you'll usually not cry out, "I don't remember how to do that!" Things that need to be explained are explained.
The Node Editor is a huge new addition to LightWave. Mr. Ablan does a fine job explaining how to use it, but in just one book he can only scratch the surface in explaining how to achieve specific effects. I hope the lighting and texturing books I've ordered cover this in more detail. If Mr. Ablan wrote a whole book about the Node Editor I'd surely get a copy.