This book is the best I've seen on the subject. I've had some experience finding arrowheads "back in the day", later as a self taught knapper, then watching a family member who knapped, sometimes making a hand ax of my own out in the field when I needed one but had no metal tools. So it was very refreshing to find this book which starts with some good writing on the history of stone tools then builds on the subject with more chapters about the process itself. I've read it once and my knapping skill has progressed from that of an Homo erectus to where I'm close to making my first modern points.
We "civilized" folk look at stone tools as being heirlooms, expensive works of art to keep safe forever up on a high shelf or case away from the children. In actuality they were the disposable razors and beer cans of the paleolithic, used once or twice then thrown away or recycled when they were broken. And making them was not rocket science. I've made hand axes using nothing but a limestone cobble hammer I picked up next to the chert nodule to form the ax.
The bare truth of the matter is that knapping is in our blood. A conservative calculation is that there were a hundred thousand unbroken generations of our ancestors who made, on a daily basis, stone hand axes. They were followed by ten thousand generations of ancestors who made progressively more elegant tools, starting from second generation hand axes and ending with the pistol flints that Andy Jackson and his contemporaries used to eliminate the competition.
For those interested in actually knapping rather than theory, Whittaker recommends reading through the book to get an overview, then concentrating on details. He gives the recommendation that the knapper should master the hard hammer techniques then go on to other techniques. There are numerous detailed explanations about why one technique or another works or fails, numerous illustrations.
Theory is of a practical nature and he clearly labels things that he knows versus suspects versus speculates. It is kind of creepy, but once you read it and look at the illustrations you can get into the head of knappers who've been dead for hundreds of years. I have a bowl of points that I've kept for decades and now I can look at them and see, "oh yes, he used an antler to push that way then he tapped here and..."
This book is expensive, hard to find, primarily uses metric measures with English conversions, but is still the best I've found on the subject.
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