This book should be titled "SEM Overview with some SEO sprinkled in".
It contains misinformation, misconceptions, and myths (particularly on CMS and dynamic sites that use query strings). There about 40-50 pages in this book that are worth reading in regards to SEO, and misses out on a lot more. SEM gets a lot of pages (how to run a PPC campaign) and the rest is fluff.
What's missing? To start: no recommendations on real SEO implementation, just that you should do things. Sure, you should write a good Title tag and Meta Description, but how long should they be? What density of keywords? Should you try to get more than one keyword in a Title tag?
Inbound links section is woefully short, 10 pages of real content, 2 pages covering directories, and the directories to submit to is a list five entries long. There are many more that count than these five.
Following the steps in this book can certainly get a site headed in the right direction, but if your market is already competitive in terms of SEO, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it doesn't really give a structure for understanding how much work is involved (there is a lot of it) or how long it will really take.
All in all, you can get all this and much much more from just a few web sites. If you feel you need to read it on paper, then print the sites out.
