Note, I haven't actually done any reading. This is just my impression of the book after skimming a few headlines and captions... First, don't order direct from the publisher. They rape you on the shipping charges. I saved $10 on the cover price, but more than made up for it in shipping charges. When it got here, I tore open the shipping package to reveal... A rather small book. Smaller than I'm used to, of course I may be spoiled by all the 800-page tomes that are abundant in today's computer book marketplace. This is a slim 400 or so page book. It's almost identical in size to the Carrara manual itself. Next, I pop the CD into the drive. Some OK stuff here - All the chapters have associated project files on the disk, and even the chapters that don't have a project per se, will have at least the chapter illustrations in jpg format. He doesn't appear to have any of the finished renders on here, though... There's plenty of demos on the CD - Carrara 3, Amapi 7, Creature Creator, UV Mapper, Digital Carvers Guild plugins, and a few other niceties. There's also a hefty user gallery with lots of images. Some we've seen before, some we haven't. And lastly, we have a couple of models - DAZ, Digimation, and Silver Wings all have some freebies on here. Now, the book... The first few chapters are short. Distressingly short. In fact, I almost cried when his animation chapter ended in four pages. But no fear! These are just the intro chapters. The book can be roughly chopped up into 4 sections. The first section is mainly theory and discussion. These are the short chapters. The second section is the tools description section. He takes each of the rooms in Carrara studio and discusses each in its own chapter. The third section is the tutorial section. Here he takes you through each modeller, the texturing process, and the skinning/animation process in depth. These chapters are long. Very, very long. The last section (last chapter, really) is where he touches on some of the non-Carrara demos on the CD. I'm actually looking forward to reading this part, as I own several DCG plugins already. So what's my overall first impression? I'll admit I was distressed when I saw the size of the book, and the first couple of chapters. I was not expecting good things. After flipping through some of the later chapters, though, I'm a little more at ease. So my first impression is a little mixed I guess you could say. Let's see how our second date goes...