Sadly, Wizards of the Coast (or Hasbro, you decide) has become the bastion of corporate, "for-profit" literature at the expense of publishing quality and gaming innovation...
The trend of the 3.5 revision, admittedly largely unecessary and done primarily to renew a revenue stream from gamers willing to be duped into buying it (by some of its own authors!), continues with this weak text.
Short, with minimal additions and *many* only trivial revisions to 3.0 material, this book panders to the 'complete-ist' in many gamers, who will compulsively purchase any new material.
The only useful items (I won't go so far as to say novel) include the Initiate section (2 1/2 pages), the compiled spell list (made your own already?) and the magical item section (7 pages). Out of 191 pages, I will be using these 20 some odd pages.
Additionally, Wizards has failed to understand their own customers... Each new book excitedly proclaims how many new FEATS, PRESTIGE CLASSES and SPELLS that the book contains. At this point, with Dragon, d20 OGL products and WotC material, there are a mind-boggling number of each of these, with only minor and typically insignificant differences between many. While I like choices as much as the next RPG player, the novelty of splicing different class abilities together and calling them a prestige class has become tired.
What we're looking for, if I may be so bold to speak for my fellow gamers, is new contextual material. The "Campaign Journal" section of this book was billed as 'Current Events', but rather than breaking new ground, or exposing new information, it merely regurgitates the plotlines of recent FR novels.
So if you're one of the slavishly devoted purchasers of WotC products, a by-product of the previously quality material that the company *had* been putting out for years...
Stop.
You're encouraging them (with your hard-earned dollars) to publish respun garbage under the guise of NEW and IMPROVED.
Let's band together and vote with our dollars. Support the d20 labels putting out quality literature for discerning gamers (Malhavoc Press), not the tripe that's rolling out of what seems to be the nadir of WotC products.