I recommend this book because it starts from the beginning, with suggestions on buying a guitar, picking a teacher, and how to spend your practice time. These suggestions are useful for beginners without previous guitar experience, or even without previous musical experience.

The next section is divided into 10 lessons where notes and chords are taught. There are pictures (although they are black and white ;o/) that help out with things. The book takes a string at a time and teaches the notes that go with it for the first few frets, as well as the fingerings. For example, for the E string the book shows you how to play E, F, G, and A on the E string. It also shows three chords to learn. It includes some good exercises to learn the chords and notes from each lesson. The next lesson goes on to show you another string and the corresponding notes, and a few more chords. By the time you reach the end of the book, you should have a pretty good idea of how to play a number of notes and chords. Somewhere along the line the book also lists all the keys and the flats that go with them.

There isn't much for songs in this book. The only song is the "12 bar blues." It changes from lesson to lesson to go with the key the chords fit into. It might be a good idea to have another book or two to practice the chords in an actual song, to make things a little more enjoyable while you're learning.

The book makes for a nice start, however, I wish it would go further.



Recommended: Yes