This is a collection of many, but not all of Dick's earliest short stories, all from the early 50s, with the sole exception of "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" which is from the 60s and is (wisely) presumably promoted on the cover to boost sales. If you're a Dick fan you'll definitely want this, but more casual fans who are less well read on their Dick would probably prefer
The Philip K. Dick Reader or another more selective anthology.
Aside from the fact that Dick's writing improved later on, the main weakness of this anthology is that all the stories hew tightly to the same theme. This was fine for short stories pumped out for the science fiction magazines at the time where they would have been mixed with many others, but many of the already somewhat predictable plots are ill-served by being placed end to end in one volume.
One notable short story which is absent from this collection is the classic (in my humble opinion) "Second Variety". This is odd not only because Second Variety is from the time period of the other stories in the book but because the introduction -apparently copied from a different, older collection- specifically cites it as being included. If you've already read Second Variety, no problem, but if you haven't, you probably should before reading this book because as the introduction mentions, it (unusually for Dick) ties in loosely with two of the stories in this collection.
All that said, this is a great collection in its own right, even if it's not necessarily the best available, because it showcases how incredibly ahead of his time Dick was. Less than a decade after WWII ended, Dick was already working on the fundamentals of the modern environmentalist movement, was rejecting the excesses of cold war paranoia while prophesizing about the futility of nuclear war, and was warning clearly about the military-industrial complex to which Eisenhower would later refer. Dick's focus was not about corporatocracy, though, so much as the self-sustaining logic of a technologically advanced society at war for decades at a time. Dick's writing here is full of clear predecessors to other SF classics like The Lathe of Heaven (and in the case of the absent "Second Variety" and its related stories, the Terminator films). A lot of the work also deals with the nature of consciousness, which Dick might be most famous for, and similarly is a forerunner to a lot of his own works including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep".
Even so some aspects of Dick's writing have not aged that well. His depiction of women is one-dimensional and often at least slightly sexist, for example. Then again, a lot of his writing here could have used some editing for clarity and continuity across the board. Other than Dick fans, this might be an eye-opening gift for a young person who would enjoy intellectually stimulating, yet simple science fiction.
