I assume that if you're reading this you're new to Blender and are looking for a great Blender book to get you up to speed. This is the book. I hate long-winded book reviews that boil down to a few relevant sentences so I will get straight to it.There are three good reasons to buy this book.1. Roland Hess knows Blender inside and out having been both a Blender artist and a software developer for some of its features. You can have tremendous confidence in what he tells you and know that it will save you time and make you a productive Blender user.2. Hess focuses like a laser beam on the most important features of Blender and there are a lot of them. He doesn't wander into things that are nice, but you may use once in the course of a year. His writing is clear and direct. He gets to the point and offers professional advice that would take you years to learn on your own. He tackles the main pillars of the Blender platform: modeling, texturing, lighting and animation. His chapter on lighting is the most coherent and useful I have ever read. In addition, he has a number of extras on his web site like great videos on texturing and modeling. You can get most of the .blend files from his site as well.3. This book will take you beyond the basics. Even though this is billed as a beginner book, Hess isn't afraid to build into the more advanced topics. Some of the stuff he covers like texturing aren't covered half as well in so called "advanced" texts. As an experienced Blender user I can highly recommend this book to intermediate and even advanced users. You will pick up some valuable info from the book. The tutorials are not cheesy little "let's make a coffee cup" tutorials. They're first rate and if you work through them you will be learning some important Blender skills and when you're done with the tutorials you will actually have something you can be proud of.If you are new to Blender, get this book and study it. Do the tutorials if you can. It will be valuable practice. If you're a veteran Blender user and want to get up to speed with the totally new Blender interface and some of the new features, get this book. The proposition is simple: you can spend 6 months hacking away at Blender and just scratch the surface or you can get this book and spend a few weeks studying it and spend the next 6 months building dazzling CG.