Product Description

Carol Vorderman's follow up to the bestselling How To Do Sudoku is even bigger and better. With over 400 puzzles this is the very biggest collection on the market. Better still are the advanced secrets and tips that Carol Vorderman is able to pass on to her readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76647 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From the Publisher
The biggest and best Sudoku book on the market - a bumper Christmas bestseller from the nation's favourite number cruncher Carol Vorderman

About the Author
Carol Vorderman is the bestselling author of a series of Detox titles. She has been the numbers face of Countdown with the late Richard Whiteley for over two decades and a popular TV-presenting personality in her own right. She was awarded an MBE in 2000.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Value for Money
This book IS massive.

It contains 420 hand-crafted puzzles, which were hand-crafted by Nikoli the Japanese Publisher who has been hand-crafting Sudoku for the Japanese for more than 20 years.

The book has also been very well laid out. One puzzle per page, which makes them big enough to put in pencil marks if required. There is an explanation of techniques for the total novice and, if the sudoku don't prove challenging enough, each puzzle page has a space for your time and score. The puzzles are also rated from easy to super-difficult and grouped accordingly.

Considering the price per puzzle from the best quality puzzle-maker available, this book represents excellent value for money and well worth buying.

As an experienced sudoku player, I was delighted with this book and use it regularly.

Excellent Value for Money
This book is massive.

It goes from easy to super-difficult (although rating puzzles is a very difficult thing to achieve. As the book itself explains, the puzzles may be rated differently elswhere and they are). The puzzles are hand-crafted from the Japanese company Nikoli, who are very well known for sudoku in Japan and have been for 20 odd years. They provide puzzles to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, amongst others. This means that the puzzles in the Massive Book are very good quality puzzles indeed, crafted to a very high standard - elegant, symmetrical, only one solution per puzzle - and fiendishly cunning. I have done computer generated puzzles and the hand-crafted do 'feel' different although they are no less challenging and the solving skills required remain the same.

I like the way this book is laid out. Obviously some thought has been put into this. There is one puzzle per page, which I like, then the puzzles are grouped according to difficulty level, with the easy puzzles first and so on until, at the back, there are the 'squiffy' puzzles (you'd be surprised how much difference that makes!) and the 16 cell puzzles. The grids themselves are big enough to put small pencil marks into the cells, which is the advantage of having one puzzle per page and which I appreciate (it also means that the sight-challenged amongst us can join in the game too).

Carol gives hints and tips at the front of the book, just in case these are your first sudoku puzzles and I liked the emails from readers of her previous book at the back. The answers to every grid are provided, should they be required and Carol also gives space at the bottom of each grid to write in your time. She also gives an example time of how long each puzzle should take and a score, which can be filled in on the scoreboard provided - should you choose so to do, I don't.

Considering that this book contains 420 hand-crafted Nikoli puzzles for approximately £7.19 the book is certainly value for money - which is why I bought it - and although it is a massive book it's not too big for small hands like mine to hold. I'd like to see this and further books of this nature to be spiral bound because the spine of mine is taking a battering but other than that, I'd say buy the book it's fantastic!

Disappointing
Although I respect Carol Vorderman's experience and knowledge, I found this book well below my expectations. The descriptions of how to do Sudoku were very poor and unclear - and it turned out, not very helpful for a non-beginner of Sudoku. After finally understanding the descriptions came the realisation that I already undertook those tasks quite early on in Sudoku solving and found them to be pretty basic. Thus the tips suggested and undertaken by most Sudoku solvers are discovered through experience.
Secondly, I had to go to the Super-difficult Puzzles(starting at p301) to gain any sort of challenge whatsoever. Thus the first 300 puzzles were a waste. So in addition to the disappointing lack of challenge, this rendered the book rather expensive for the remaining 120 more challenging Sudoku puzzles. On a positive note, I found the "Sudoku 16 Puzzles" (those with numbers 1-16 to solve) more challenging and interesting.