22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, August 7, 2001
This review is from: BMW 3 Series Enthusiast's Companion (Paperback)
A new 3er book by Jeremy Walton and published by Bentley, I figured it was a "must have." But after reading it, I was surprisingly disappointed.
I got the impression that the author did a whole lot of research which took longer than expected, and so had to rush the final manuscript out to meet the deadline. I found a number of obvious typos, errors and other discrepancies. The book has a huge amount of data and information in it, but it is disorganized, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. The illustrations often have little or nothing to do with the neighboring text, there is nowhere nearly as many pictures as I had hoped for, and none in color. The author jumps back and forth between topics numerous times, which I found distracting, to say the least. Many statistics, measurements and performance figures are included, but they are not easily compared as there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to how or where in the book they are presented. Worse, he quotes most figures in their original standard of measure, without providing any conversions. This leads to things like a paragraph comparing the fuel economy of two different models with one being given in MPG (Imperial) and the other in MPG (US). Similar comparisons with prices are evident, using German, US and UK currencies at random.
The production figures are interesting, but use the traditional British method of counting in that the actual year of production is given rather than the model year, which makes the figures difficult to follow, showing things like E36s being built in 1990. There are numerous chapters on racing 3ers, but again the coverage seemed to be poorly organized to me. There was a fair amount of bias (to my E21 oriented preferences) towards the '02s and then the later E36 and E46s, far too much coverage of some of the odd UK "specials."
In sum, my impression is that this book tries to cover too many different 3ers, and seems to have been rushed into print without enough proofreading. I have my copy now, but if something should ever happen to it, I doubt that I will replace it.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BMW rules the road!!!, February 1, 2003
This review is from: BMW 3 Series Enthusiast's Companion (Paperback)
This book has tons of great info which merits 5 easy stars. BUT, if the editor had done a little better job with lining up the material and not constantly repeating some of the facts it could have been even better
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of detailed info, but..., January 29, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: BMW 3 Series Enthusiast's Companion (Paperback)
Much like other reviewers, I though this book contains a huge amount of well researched and detailed information, but is barely readable due to the poor standard of english. Sure, you can't expect Shakespeare in a "car-book", but sentences that you have to read three times to understand are too much. Short and simple sentences would much improve this book - Sounds like advice for a 3rd grade student!
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