Even though this book is part of James Davies' "Elementary Go Series," I wouldn't describe it as a book for beginners. By this I don't mean that beginners won't benefit from it, but that players over a very broad range of strength can learn different things from it. I didn't read this book until I was already low dan level, but I still found the problems in the later parts of the book challenging, and continue to do so.

The book starts off with the basics of life and death, mainly looking at different 'eyespaces' (the unoccupied space a group has to try to make two eyes in). The discussion then evolves to various commonly encountered side and corner shapes, eventually covering some fairly complex positions. Each chapter has some examples followed by a handful of related problems.

The advantage of familiarity with shapes that occur frequently is not just that you know how to live/kill a particular shape if it arises, but that you can read ahead and try to create/force a shape that you know the status of. More importantly, doing the problems will improve your reading ability and instinct for vital points. In the long term being able to read the positions around the board accurately and to completion is important in helping you devise a realistic whole board strategy.

This book adopts the "status approach," which basically means that instead of reading to kill or reading to live you read to work out the status of a group. ie. If black plays first can black live? What if white plays first, is black still alive anyway? Or maybe black can still get a favourable ko? I think this is a very good approach because it teaches people not to waste moves making living groups live or dead groups die.

This is a book teaching you how to play in life-and-death situations. Each chapter presents a kind of shape that is on the border between being alive and dead, and tells you when it's alive, when it's dead, and when that depends on who plays next. The chapters all have problems testing you on the shapes in the chapter or presenting closely related shapes.

It's a good book. Don't worry if you give up part way through - it's draining to read all of a book like this, and any practice in life and death will improve your go game. If you like this kind of book but want something more complete look at Cho's dictionary.