Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Advanced Sudoku and Kakuro (Teach Yourself: Games/Hobbies/Sports)

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This book provides lots of discussion, ideas, and techniques for the advanced Sudoku player bored with "difficult" puzzles in the newspapers and wanting to move beyond the simplest advanced techniques such as X-wing and Swordfish. The discussion of techniques differs from the typical approaches you'll find on the web, and is more general. Lots of practice puzzles along the way to help turn theory into useful technique. Also, lots of encouragement for players who rely too much on penciling in.

I have been hooked on Sudoku for over a year and have long been searching books and the internet for tips on solving advanced puzzles. While most sources either restate the obvious, simple approaches, or try to explain techniques that only a genius could understand, this book was able to teach some powerful solving approaches in understandable English.

Teach Yourself Advanced Sudoku and Kakuro starts with the basics and works up to the "Sudoku Master Class." Included are several puzzles in each chapter, designed to illustrate the main principles of that section. These were very helpful, although I would have appreciated some explanations in the Solutions section to highlight where the new techniques could be used in each puzzle.

The latter half of the book discusses Kakuro and the fancier variations of Sudoku. While I haven't yet read the sections on the Sudoku variations, I did go through the Kakuro chapter. Unfortunately, this chapter did not provide much beyond the basics.

All in all, though, if you just want to bring your Sudoku skills to the next level (or beyond), this is the book for you :)