Teach Yourself Go, Charles Matthews

Synopsis
"Go" is the Chinese board game that is comparable to chess. This book explains the rules of the game with step-by-step illustrations. The origins and the history and culture of the game are also covered.

Comments & Reviews

Good, but... - Written by Ninito

This is a alright book in my opinion. It was actually the first book I ever read on go and I actually would not mind if i ever had or ever will read it again. It helps with some, but fails to explain or go into much else.

Beginners book with some real meat to it - Written by Riff Raff

I actually wouldn’t recommend this book to complete beginners at all. It is however my personal favorite "beginners" book because it’s a book that you can go back to several times and get something new out of it each time. Whereas most beginners books are basically throwaways after you’ve learned the rules and such, this one offers insights into deeper aspects of the game on a regular basis. You may not understand some of these things on the first reading, but that’s OK. It gives you something else to look forward to understanding later.

Nice try, but.... - Written by Alan56

The "Teach Yourself…." series is legendary for its range of self-teaching volumes covering all manner of subjects. Most are excellent. This one, however, is not. As an introduction to playing go it is just about acceptable, but in my view it fails to achieve on several levels. I think this book’s main flaw is that it tries to cover too many aspects of play, but doesn’t cover any of them in much depth. The text can be rather obscure in places, making what I feel are unwarranted assumptions about the knowledge of the book’s intended readership. Finally – and I’d stress that this is an observation based solely on my personal taste – the language is often rather typical of upper-middle class English. The author uses the somewhat antiquated impersonal pronoun "One…." throughout, and is prone to making what I consider rather condescending remarks such as "This good advice has never yet had any effect on a certain class of aggressive players (The phenomenon is so distasteful no example is given".

This isn’t a bad book overall, but for beginners there are better (and more easily accessible) books on the market.

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