I love Michele dearly -- she is a sweet person who has contributed a lot to the Max training scene -- but this book really misses the boat for all except those who are complete beginners to character animation with Max.
For those folks it will suit as an outline to the concepts needed for character animation, but for anyone who has even slightly worked with Max this book is as much of a skeleton as that needed to rig your creatures. There is a halfway decent chapter on using Meshsmooth and box modeling techniques for those unfamiliar with this, but that's about it.
The biggest omission is due to the nature of Max 7 itself -- now that Max ships with Character Studio just about every aspect of rigging your own bones from scratch (and not using Physique but the Skin that came with Max 6) is just plain obsolete.
It is clear this is just a rehash of her previous Max 6 edition, but the rules of the game have changed, and anyone not using Character Studio nowadays is just working way behind the times.
What's really odd about this is Michele knows Character Studio very well indeed, having written a book on release 3. That she did not follow up with a book on release 4 or, more to the point, included that within this tome is just plain unfantomable (her CS 3 book is out of print but worth seeking out).
Pass on this disaster and save your pennies for the character animation book coming out in the fall that promises to cover CS 4 along with Max 7.