In "Contemporary Landscape Photography", Heilman tries to cover *a lot* of material, with a wide range of topics including equipment, exposure, composition, field work, and post processing (among others). Sadly, it misses the mark on basically all of these. As a book which is clearly meant for beginning and novice photographers, this book does such a poor job at explaining many fundamental concepts that it would do more to confuse that audience than educate.
First the positives. The print quality of this book is quite good, and the images are almost all excellent. If you like landscape photography, you'll find some inspiring pictures within. The images in this book are by far the best thing inside. Sadly, beyond that, I didn't find much to like about this book.
The opening chapter, "Equipment & Techniques", suffers from a problem I've seen in other beginner photography books: forward referencing (i.e. where jargon is used before it is defined; and sometimes it's not defined at all). A good novice photography book needs to establish fundamental concepts first, and only then discuss topics that build on it. This book doesn't do that.
I'm always bewildered when I read books like this one that start out talking about equipment (including features like high ISO noise reduction; metering modes; histograms; etc), before even describing what the photographic triangle is. If you're a beginner, what good does it do you to read about how different cameras have exposure compensation features in 1/2 or 1/3 stop increments, when you haven't even read anything about what a stop of light even is? The overall content on equipment was mediocre at best (perhaps it's best described as an "overview"). Don't expect to learn much here. The basics are described, but with less detail than you'd find in many other books.
Later on, this book tries cover the exposure triangle, but I have never read such a horrible description of this. A firm understanding of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO is absolutely critical in photography. Many books are dedicated entirely to this important topic, and this book doesn't come close to explaining the topic adequately. The descriptions are very terse, there aren't enough examples, and the material is disorganized (in fact in some cases it's actually useless). There is an entire page dedicated to an EV chart that nobody is ever going to use, and adds nothing to the explanation of photographic exposure. Heilman starts doing reciprocity calculations talking about equivalent exposures before even explaining what's going on. How is a beginner going to know f/22 is 3 stops away from f/8 or why that matters?
Another example of a poor explanation in this book is the description on metering modes. The whole topic of 18% reflectance is just butchered. Instead of just saying that light meters consider everything as a middle "gray" tonal value (and hence the need to compensate when your scene is really darker or lighter than this), there's some very confusing text saying sky/trees/grass are 18% gray, and things "average out" to gray in such a scene, but in other scenes get over or under-exposed. The text makes it sounds like the author just "knows" what the reflectance value of things in the photograph are (and you should too), rather than understanding how a meter works. There's also some inaccuracies in the text (albeit usually inconsequential, like calling the shape of a histogram a "bell curve", when few histograms will actually exhibit that shape).
Here's another bad example of explanations. There's a topic about "flash and artificial light" and it basically talks about light painting without describing exactly what it is or how it's done. It goes only as far as saying you use artificial light, like flashlights, but doesn't describe what's really going on. This topic also just pulls out the term "flash compensation", and of course, there's nowhere that's described (and why that's different than ambient light exposure). If you've never heard of this term, you'd be left scratching your head.
The next section of this book is what you might consider the "artistic" part of the book. There is some very vague and poorly described topics on composition, some rhetoric about learning from masters and finding a "style", and some generally unhelpful text about lighting and weather. There are also some topics on creative techniques like long exposures, panning, and depth of field, etc. Like just about every other topic in this book, each idea is only a page or two long with really shallow descriptions that fall well short of being useful in practice. Take a topic like "Evoking Emotion" on page 76. There's so much that can be said about this. Use of tones, colour, and textures can be used effectively to convey a mood, but how and why these work is basically only given a sentence or two of treatment. Half the text is about "being in touch with your emotions", but that's not going to translate to good photographs by itself.
Chapter 3 is entitled "On location", and this might better be described as "filler material". Here you'll find dozens of short 1 or 2 page sections on an array of different shooting conditions/subjects like sunrise/sunset, clouds, the moon, weather, etc. Most of the text is extremely generic and repetitive, and almost entirely void of useful content. I'll give you an example of what to expect. On page 136, the topic is "Majestic Mountains". There are 4 paragraphs that basically can be summed up as saying "I hike a lot, and landscapes are beautiful. Every mountain is unique, and it changes with the seasons and weather. Try different focal lengths and shoot from different perspectives." There appeared to be no real purpose to this part of the book.
The last section is on post-processing. Like the section on equipment, this section also fails to be instructive. Basically, if you don't already know how to use Photoshop, you're probably going to be lost with the descriptions of how layers are used for various operations; if you do know how to use Photoshop, you'll learn nothing new.
Overall, I'd say that although there's a lot of different topics covered in this book, it's obvious that none of these topics is given the treatment they deserve. If you're a novice, I highly suggest you skip this book, and get dedicated books to teach you about technical fundamentals, composition, and post-processing instead. There are plenty to choose from, and you'll learn far more, and have way fewer gaps in your understanding than if you tried to take it all in by reading this book. Not recommended.
