Life In 19x19

Right I'm very weak in this area and want to improve my fundamentals as efficiently as possible. So I'm looking for advice. I hope the advice here might help others in my position.

What areas need to be worked on? Should I ignore tesuji for the time being or read a little theory and then start drilling them? Basic Life and Death I assume is a given, as is drilling basic shapes with a book like Graded Go Problems Vol. 2. What should I be doing apart from doing tsumego? I assume Attack and Defence is too advanced for me at this point.

Thoughts? I'm looking at picking up a few problem books because I enjoy well constructed puzzles and I prefer book form to online for tsuemgo as it removes the temptation to "click and see." And start playing fast games where I start taking risks and not playing as safe as my comfort zone wants me to.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I don't really like solving tsumegos myself, so I will recommend other things. Learn about efficiency of shapes, dsaun on KGS has sometimes nice lecture about them. Or start with http://senseis.xmp.net/?Shape
Learn about how to achieve maximum with as few stones as possible. Also learn when to attack and when to defend. I recommend Learn to play go series - volume 3 and 4.
If you like tsumegos and life & death problems, you will probably enjoy playing on asian go servers (wbaduk or tygem), they like fighting and they don't worry about strategy until much later.

For now, I would recommend that you just play, Bodhire. You're still at a point where you're getting over the characteristic play style of raw beginners. When you emerge from that, you'll be at a point where we can start to talk about which parts of your play are strongest and which are weakest, and that will affect what recommendations people will made.

Definitely when you're at a level to understand it, "Attack and Defense" is a great book. Or you can read it now, just for fun. But it will require several things that you will develop as you climb the next ten or so ranks: reading ability, a sense of positional judgment, and some grasp of the basics of fighting and life and death which will be used as analogies to hoist you up the next step.

But at this point playing lots of games, getting reviews, and doing tsumego are all excellent ideas and the fastest path to improvement.

jts wrote:But at this point playing lots of games, getting reviews, and doing tsumego are all excellent ideas and the fastest path to improvement.

Thanks.

I hear you about not preferring online problems. But Mr. K's site is, IMO, very good because he is so thorough. That is one advantage of online problems. Most books do not go into very much detail.

Yes, it is in Japanese, but here are 40 easy tsumego problems.

http://mrkigo.sakura.ne.jp/ytumegoindex.html

And here is his basic life and death page. Very thorough, as you can see.

http://mrkigo.sakura.ne.jp/ksikatuindex.html