Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide(R) to Hockey

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I bought this book to learn how NHL hockey is played. I read the Complete Idiot's Guide Football and found it to be a very well organized, comprehensive description of the game. This book about hockey is nothing at all like that. If you don't know how hockey is played, you won't be any smarter after reading this. There are 298 pages of history and only 18 or 19 pages on the rules. You will learn what icing and offside penalties are and which way players are not allowed to hit each other with the stick and that's about it. Nothing at all about strategy and tactics and no glossary of terms. I was disappointed. If you want to learn the basics of hockey, look elsewhere.

I was disppointed in this book, especially since it was touted to have "comprehensive" rules. It has only one chapter on rules, and even then it barely brushes the surface.

If you want to know about the background of how modern hockey came to be, it's great. But I wanted to know more about strategy, rules, penalties, officials' hand signals, etc. and there is very little in it. Had I known what I know now, I wouldn't have bought it. Very disappointing.

alot of history not allot of strategy or technique.

These Idiot's Guides and Dummies books are always chalk full of facts. Unfortunately, this Idiot's Guide is a poor guide in UNDERSTANDING the how-to inner workings that is the GAME of hockey. Instead, we get a haphazardly organized though well-rounded overview of the development of the sport, the mile-marker players to memorable events but it's all just trivia. While interesting and enlightening, it's an in-depth historical timeline and not much else.

I'm a fan of the Dummies series, and got this Idiot's Guides at a garage sale since I've always wanted to learn about hockey but intimidated by all that technical stuff. Well, nothing technical here, folks. I figured this Guide would be structured like a Dummies book, which has a healthy dose of both history and the actual description of what hockey is: positions, players, plays, rules, how the game starts, evolves, ends, the technical process and anatomy of the game (strategies), equipment, tips/advice, etc. You know, general stuff like, what's a penalty and how are they incurred to the officials and how players are drafted, what makes a player a good athlete in this position or that, and terminology--but you won't get that here, fellow pukeheads. Nope, not even enough to know the difference between a center, defenseman and a wing, or what they do, supposed to do, etc. You get a paltry twenty pages (Ch 27, 28, and a teeny 'Appendix A' in how to watch hockey on TV) and no glossary of terms. How can I appreciate the numerous names and history without understanding the fundamentals of the game itself? This was published in '02 but you don't even get a breakdown of the current NHL as a league or the teams, how they're divided, how they get to the playoffs or anything recent. You do get that peripherally, as a byproduct of history-telling.

As a general reference guide to hockey history--it's not a bad book to have around, per say, but as I've said, it's not neatly organized and tends to jump around, sometimes not saying anything relevant at all and it's a rather dry read that tries to be engaging but fails. This book is more geared toward people who already have a basic understanding of hockey and its history. I'm sticking to my Dummies and at my next garage sale, I'm forewarning the person who's intimidated about 'learning hockey' and that they don't have to worry. It's not *that* kind of book.

I bought this book to be used as a reference on a paper I wrote for school on the Miracle on Ice. Unfortunately, it didn't come in on time. However, I still love it. It has a lot of information in it about the way hockey has been formed. I love the quotes that are on the sides of the pages throughout the book. It doesn't have a lot of information on rules and stuff as others previously stated. But if you aren't looking for that, it is a great buy!