The bestest of books

[snorri]

2. Was your estimate that a book is (++) premised on the reader giving the book one thorough reading, or on fully understanding the material in it?
3. I'm assuming that most of the (++) are only valid if it's your first time... clearly there are diminishing returns to, say, knowing more tesuji. If you think the book you're recommending is (++) even if you've already studied the topic a little, I'd be curious to know that.

My previous comment is related to these questions 2) and 3). First of all, IMHO, reading a book may do nothing at all for your playing strength. In fact, initially it may make it worse as you try new things you saw in the book but don't yet understand. By the time you understand, it may be hard to trace back the improvement to any given book, especially if you are doing other things like playing or getting advice from stronger players. I never read a book and then put it down and said: "aha, now I see the light" and immediately started playing better. I have read all of the books on your appended list except for Robert's and Sakata's, plus many more that aren't listed. That being said, like a trumpet player always looking for the perfect mouthpiece, I still dream of seeing such a book someday and so I probably will check out Robert's and Sakata's.

My playing strength has always been highly correlated with my reading ability at the time (as measured by the difficulty of tsumego that I can solve). It's painfully, unforgivingly correlated and often it seems there is not a damn concept or strategy or philosophy in the world that has ever seemed to break that. For me, only improvements in reading improve rank.

But I may be a really bad example because I do study. People who never study at all but just play may be able to benefit from an occasional book. I'm not rejecting the idea that ++ books exist for some people. I just haven't had that experience. I hope I'm not alone.

[Numsgil]

I have a lot of books, but in terms of books that were "aha" epiphany eye openers that really improved my game:

1. Opening theory made easy. As a DDK just starting to get serious about Go (I think I was maybe 18k), this really shrunk the 19x19 board to something that made sense to me on a strategic level. Prior to this, I was just laying stones on the board without much more rhyme or reason than corners-side-center. After it, I at least had some sense of what my goals are for the opening. It also taught some basic concepts of shape and things like that.

2. Second book of Go - Basically the chapters on capture races. After reading those chapters, I was beating stronger players by reading out that I could win capture races that looked intractable to read out the usual way. This was at the DDK/SDK border.

3. Bruce Wilcox's "Dojo" - At maybe 7 or 8 kyu I went through his book and his two computer programs (interactive lectures essentially). It provided a basic framework for understanding what makes moves proper or improper. In terms of codifying "kyu basic instinct" his material is invaluable.

4. Making good shape - I recently went through the book entirely. Including all the problems. There's an obvious blip up in my rank graph in the past two months or so (from half way to 3k to 3k) when I was working through with this book. It's helped me think in terms of "okay, I want to connect, are there any forcing moves I can make in the mean time for profit?" which if nothing else puts my opponent on edge Basically the problems in the book got me to see opportunities in games where, even if a forcing exchange doesn't kill an enemy group, if I can force it to eat stones in exchange for influence or clump his stones into dumplings in sente, that's a solid victory for me.

Other books are good but I wouldn't describe them as making me significantly stronger after reading them.

[flOvermind]

- Kageyama, Toshiro - Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go: It's the single best book written on go ever.

In the category "amount of knowledge needed for study", it is rather weak though.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean you need too much previous knowledge in order to study effectively with it? Or that you don't gain enough knowledge?

I've always had the impression that you need to be at least a strong SDK, if not dan, to really benefit from it. But that's just a feeling I get from talking to people of various ranks who have read that book...

For reference, Robert's list is:

Joseki vol. 1: Fundamentals
Joseki vol. 2: Strategy
Tesuji (Davies)
Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go
Stategic Concepts of Go
Attack and Defense

I agree 100% with this list, at least on the books I have already read. That sort of makes me want to get the missing ones

[Akura]

The point is, you can't learn anything from Kageyama's about the game itself, except for: "Make solid moves", "Let your stones go walking", "Read ladders, they are so damn easy!" But you learn a lot about learning go, approaching josekis and correcting your attitude towards the game. So the book helps you improve but not by showing you fusekis, tesujis or what so ever.
And you can learn something from it, no matter what your rank is, as it does not teach you (a lot) technical stuff.

[cyclops]

1 Life and Death
2 Tesuji
3 Attack and defense

[cdybeijing]

Life and Death from the Elementary Go Series has been an interesting book for me, given that it was the first go book I ever acquired.

I read the early chapters about basic dead shapes when I was DDK and it was like a revolution to me, but then the book quickly became too difficult for me. Months later, I picked it up again after several stones improvement and I learned the L groups - all of the sudden, L groups were appearing in all of my games. Tripods and J groups came next.

Now after more than a year playing go and approaching the dan ranks, I realized one day that ko's of significance were rarely occurring in my games and that was probably due to a blind spot in my reading. I'm reading the Hane for Ko section in Life and Death now and hoping to find a new resource.

One day hopefully not too far off I will be handling carpenter's squares routinely and all will be well with the world.

[RobertJasiek]

- Kageyama, Toshiro - Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go: It's the single best book written on go ever.

In the category "amount of knowledge needed for study", it is rather weak though.

What do you mean by that?

I mean what I write: Lessons in the Fundamentals is rather weak at conveying knowledge because it conveys very little knowledge while much more knowledge is needed for study. The book tells you "only" to study all the fundamentals but it almost does not tell what those are. It needs other sources for the actual knowledge. E.g., joseki principles, see my books. For every other topic mentioned in Lessons in the Fundamentals and every not mentioned topic, more such books teaching the fundamentals knowledge in detail are needed.