oren wrote:to go over some questions I've had on joseki. I've never found the explanations awkward or hard to follow. I found the descriptions useful and fairly good detail.
So you have used it as a dictionary, to look up only exactly something specific? For that purpose every dictionary would do, if only it happens to have the variation you are searching. But why do you need the text? Aren't the diagrams enough for that?
I used the Ishida for learning and (more or less) understanding all those josekis (and some major variations) in it. For that purpose it is written badly. At that time, I needed to read the Ishida thrice in succession to succeed, i.e. go through the diagrams' moves thrice. The text was of little help, except as a source of keywords from which I could then guess some more general strategic concept. So above 95% of the study was my own effort applied to the diagrams' moves and the keywords. Such a book I do not call "well written" but "badly written". The concept of which contents is buried in diagrams, piles of diagrams and superfluous texts is good though; Ishida made a good selection (for his time and the intention to show also a good number of complicated failure variations).
A good selection alone does not equal good writing though. It merely means that your pure quick dictionary lookup or my extra eager repetitive study could work.
You say "fairly good detail". If you mean the diagram variations, ok; there is some detail (for the kyu learner). If you mean the text, no; apart from what the diagrams show and ladder hints or such, the text hardly offers more than keywords. E.g., Vol. 1. p. 132 Dia. 164 "the standard tesuji of 3 to 7" offers the keyword-like hint that there is a particular tesuji kind worth remembering as a tesuji (here the informed reader recognises what he may have seen elsewhere: the, what we - not the Ishida - call 'driving tesuji').
