Hi,

I've read a fair amount of go-books, and I'd like to share thoughts on them. This first post is about tsumego-books.

Kano, Graded go problems for beginners series.
- Excellent selection of problems by level. I started at book 1, and at 10 kyu I'm about to finish book 3, which contains slightly challenging problems for me.
- Problems are per area, like life&death, middle-game, opening, end-game.
- You learn from correct and wrong answers.
- Basically just collections of problems.

Baduktopia, Jump Level Up series.
- Very nice books for my level. I just finished book 1, and I'm going through book 2.
- There's a 1-2 page tutorial on some technique, like using jachung (lack of liberties) in a Life and death situation, followed by 2-3 pages of problems where you use that technique.
- In addition to life&death, also contains other areas of go technique, including professional openings with 50 or so moves with some small comments.
- A problem is often followed by variations of the problem which actually show the correct move, so they need to be covered to not see it too early. Also some wrong answers you need to refute.
- Answers are on a separate book you need to buy. (One answer book for the 5 problem books.) Just the correct answer is shown.
- Both a collection of problems and a book for a classroom, or self-study.
- Contains also some lousy manga.

Baduktopia, Essential Life&Death.
- Similarly to Jump level up, contains some pages of problems per technique, like Hane to expand the eye space.
- No tutorial pages, just problems. You need to cover the next problems by paper if you don't want to see the first move of the answers.
- This book is aimed at showing life&death situations that are common in games, and I like it a lot.
- Answers are on PDFs that you can download from http://baduktopia.co.kr/eng/ (There's an obsolete .com page which does not contain the answer books.)
- The book 1 is very trivial for my level, for the most part, but on some problems I seem to get stuck for a while. Book 2 seems more on my level, but book 3 seems to contain quite hard problems.

And let's not forget the Cho Chikun’s Encyclopedia of Life and Death, which is available at http://tsumego.tasuki.org
- Just problems and no solutions.
- I don't say much anything about it as I've done just some pages so far.

I got the Jump Level Up complete set (1-5) for Christmas last year but I've only just got around to working though them - I'm just finishing book 5 this weekend. I think they're a good set. I have my doubts about the quoted strength range http://senseis.xmp.net/?JumpLevelUp since I'm not finding the problems too hard.

_________________
I am John. John-I-Am.