Uberdude wrote:
They are both excellent books, with Opening Theory Made Easy towards the easy end for you (and cheaper) and Fundamental Principles of Go on the harder side.
P.S. Lamp, how about posting your most recent game and let's see if you followed all Otake's "15-25k" advice. My bet is no.
Hah. I'll actually take you up on that, perhaps tomorrow, although I fully expect to be shown wrong.
The thing is though, and maybe it's just me, that reading that I'm supposed to do X, Y, and Z is only useful to me until the idea that I need to do X, Y, and Z sinks in. But just because the idea has sunk in doesn't mean I do it execute the ideas perfectly every time, it just means I start consciously taking them into consideration when I choose moves. The failures then come in weighing priorities, or perhaps not correctly judging how the board would develop if I play a certain way.
So I can read OTME, and see things like "build box-like moyos" or "don't play near thickness". I already consciously think about those and almost all of the other 18 principles in OTME during every game. Which will help me do it more effectively? Reading the book again, or simply playing games and getting reviews and having people point out where I failed to follow the principles?
In the book, almost none of the diagrams (if any at all) are full board positions. So you're looking at probably one corner of the board, when you already know what the definining theme of this principle is. It's much easier than when you have roughly 4x as much board space to consider and you don't know which principle applies. And that's the area that I'm not sure the book necessarily helps with.
So in summary, I think that books like OTME or ItB are useful to teach you that you need to do certain things or consider certain things. But when it comes to application in real games, you need whole board problems, or game reviews of your own games.
Personally, my recommendations for fuseki are:
20k - 15k: In the Beginning
17k - 12k: Opening Theory Made Easy
10k - 1k: 501 Opening Problems
6k - 1k: Get Strong at the Opening
8k - ?d: Way of Play for the 21st Century
I've read the first 2. Working through the 501OP. Tried GSatO and put it down because it was harder than 501OP. Also slowly working through Way of Play.
I also agree that Fundamental Principles of Go is maybe a little hard. It's a good book with useful ideas, but I had to put it down because I wasn't getting much out of it. I would read the sections, and almost always fail to solve most of the problems at the end of each chapter. Maybe again when I'm 5k.
All that aside, it's a light read, so maybe I'll pick it up again one day and go through the first 5 principles again just to see how I feel coming back to it after a few months. It probably wouldn't take more than 5-10 hours to go through the whole book, so it's not a huge time commitment.