I couldn't put the book down! I can't say that about any other chess book I have read. Tactics are fun! You can't just have one chess book and expect to learn everything you need too, however you definitely need this one in your collection. After I read this book my game has improved. I recommend re-taking the tests at the end over and over again at least 3 times with some time in-between. That way the tactics will really sink in. The best thing about this book you can understand the concepts without having a chessboard in front of you to work them out. They also use real games of masters, that way you can load them from Chessmaster 6000 database (a computer chess program) and just advance one move at a time while reading the book. Although some moves in a few games didn't match up exactly with chessmaster 6000 the final outcome of the games did end up the same. I don't know if chessmaster 6000 was wrong or Yasser/Silman. The only bad thing I can say is, I wish they would have marked the files and ranks and their diagrams, it would have made it a little easier. I found myself constantly counting and saying the alphabet. I talked with Yasser (on chess.net, he frequents there a lot, and the cool thing is, if you challenge him he will accept, even if your just a beginner chess player!) about this book and he said "out of all his books with Jeremy Silman, he (Yasser) did the least work on this one." So I guess my congratulations goes to Silman for an outstanding job.