Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great but for the grid sizes, November 21, 2006
As a sudoku addict who likes to work on hard to very hard puzzles, I really like this book -- it presents a number of advanced techniques, and it contains hundreds of puzzles that seem to run from slightly to very challenging (I haven't done them all yet).
However, a warning is in order: in spite of the large format of the book, six puzzle grids per page is unreasonable. Difficult puzzles require at least some marking up, and this requires space. The small grids are not user-friendly in this regard.
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64 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Teaches great Sudoku solving techniques, September 23, 2006
I am a total beginner at sudoku, but I had fun with the dozen or so puzzles I worked on this summer's fishing trip. So I just had to get a book on the subject... but which one? I decided it would be better to get a strategy book rather than just a puzzle book. I looked at several of them, but this one caught my eye, MENSA is smart people. They should know how to do sudoku real good, huh?
The author of the book is Peter Gordon who, according to the introduction, has been writing and editing puzzles for decades. The puzzles were all made by Wayne Gould, who runs sudoku.com. Wayne did not invent sudoku, Howard Garns did that in the late '70s. It didn't catch on in the U.S. at that time, but it did become popular in Japan, where they changed the rules slightly into what they are today. Wayne created a computer program to generate sudoku puzzles, and got the puzzles published in various English language newspapers. Hence, he was responsible for making sudoku popular in the United States here recently. Peter Gordon's family would always ask for his help with solving difficult sudoku puzzles. Because of that, he put together this book so that they would stop bothering him all the time.
There are 11 chapters in this book. Each chapter is dedicated to one or more related strategies for solving sudoku puzzles. Each chapter explains techniques for solving increasingly complicated puzzles. The chapters are "One-choice", "Scanning", "Elimination", "Subsets", "Interaction", "Candidate-free solving", "X-wing family", "Gordonian logic", "Forcing chains and grid coloring", "Bilocation and bivalue graphs", and "Guessing". At the end of each chapter there are 12 puzzles which may require the use of any of the techniques discussed in the book to that point. After the last chapter, there are pages and pages of puzzles... 800 puzzles alltogether.
Prior to reading this book, I already knew the "One-choice", "Scanning", and "Elimination" techniques. While reading the first several chapters, I figured out "Interaction" on my own. The rest of the techniques are great! Some are very complicated, but they all have one thing in common: working through the explanations and examples in the book give a more complete feel for the relationship between rows, columns, and boxes, and how cells with similar multi-number patterns are connected. Before reading this book, I was a complete beginner. Now I'm better, but I'm not sure how much better. And that leads to my first complaint about this book.
I wish the puzzles were rated as "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", or something like that. On the fishing trip, the puzzles we worked had 1 star if they were easy, on up to 5 stars for really hard ones. At that time I could solve an easy one in fifteen minutes or so. I'm up to puzzle 37 in this book right now, and these take a lot longer than 15 minutes to solve. I guess it's good that I can solve them at all, but it would be nice to know whether they are 3 star puzzles or 5 star puzzles. My only other complaint about this book is that after 2 weeks, the binding has already failed! It's a puzzle book... it really should be spiral bound.
Still, I am glad that I got this book instead of a book that only contained puzzles. I've learned a lot about sudoku, and I have hundreds of puzzles to work on... enough to last me a long while. And the price was ok, too.
Also, I recently got a cheapy sudoku puzzle book in the grocery checkout line, and I went straight to the hardest puzzles in the book and they were no problem... this book prepared me well!
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Does what it should but missed some details to really shine., December 7, 2006
There's a section for each solving method: one-choice, scanning, elimination, subsets, interaction, candidate-free, x-wing, gordonian logic, chain forcing/grid coloring, bi-location/value graphs, and guessing. The topics are covered well. A number of puzzles requiring the techniques just taught follows each section. Additional puzzles follow the teaching section. Negatives: 1) (as another reviewer observed) the grid size really is a little small for the more complicated puzzles, 2) (as another reviewer observed) the binding is looking a little questionable even with careful use, 3) and my biggest gripe, no section on construction puzzles. I'd have liked to get some insight on constructing puzzles at specific difficulties. Specific difficulties with specific requirements (these numbers in these cells) would have been even better.
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by Frank Longo
by Frank Longo
by Frank Longo
