It is a good book. I think its reputation suffered from two things. First, it was not quite the beginners book that it was partly intended to be. Second, the at times hilarious reliance on japanese terms harmed its accessability.

In reality though, everything is there to make you a competent player. And as a book to come back to with some knowledge and experience, it is a great refresher.

You have to remember that when the book came out, the English go literature was almost non-existent. There were no accepted English terms for many go concepts. Even today we say tesuji, sente, gote, tenuki, joseki, seki, hane, ko, aji-keshi, kikashi, and so on. An English rendition of sente, upper hand, had appeared in the English translation of Korschelt, but never caught on (thank goodness!). Not to rely on Japanese terms would have meant inventing a new vocabulary which would have meant nothing to existing Western go players and might, like upper hand, have bombed. Besides, other internationally played games have terminology that came from different languages, like finesse in bridge and Zwischenzug in chess. Better to let English go terms emerge and evolve in the go community.

In that case, wouldn't it have made sense to include a visual glossary? Showing an example of each of the terms?

I've owned Basic Techniques of Go for a long time and I glanced through it a few times in the past, but I never studied it seriously. I may have been put off by the fact that almost half of the book is devoted to playing high-handicap games.

Since I am returning to playing Go after a long break, I decided to use this book as a kind of refresher course. I am finding it to be surprisingly good. Even the sections on handicap play are quite interesting.

I have read negative reviews of the book in the past and I am wondering if there is anybody else out there who likes this book and feels like they got something out of reading it.