HomeSudoku BooksExtreme Sudoku For Dummies |
|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 10 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
 Advanced Sudoku Made "Simple" Sep 20, 2008
By Jan Peczkis
"Scholar and Thinker"
This book contains not only difficult Sudoku puzzles, but also a good description of strategies for solving them. These strategies include: Naked pairs, naked triplets, hidden pairs, hidden triplets, intersection removal, the X-wing, swordfish, various chains, etc. Although many of these strategies can also be found for free on the internet, the clarity of the explanations in this book, in my opinion, alone make it worth having.
A series of conventional advanced sudoku puzzles is provided, and answers are given in the back. Each puzzle is 3.25 inch by 3.25 inch (8.3 cm by 8.3 cm) in size, making it conveniently large enough to pencil-in the possibilities for each square.
This book also includes unconventional sudoku-based puzzles and their solutions. This encompasses sudoku jigsaw puzzles, killer puzzles, target puzzles, and 12 by 12 (instead of the conventional 9 by 9) sudoku puzzles.
Get busy!
9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
With this book I'm no longer a Sudoku dummy Sep 29, 2008
By F. W. Crossman
I recently acquired a nice computer-aided Sukoku solver called UniSudoku for Macintosh computers and decided that since the drudgery of determining what options remained for each square were handled nicely by this solver, that I could concentrate on the strategy of solving Sudoku puzzles without guessing. I started to look for strategies published online and got hopelessly confused with the multitude of names for these various strategies.
I then bought this book. The strategies it offers for really hard Sudokus (especially x-y (conjugate pair) chains, x-y chains, and unique rectangles) have been fantastic for solving every level of difficulty of Sudoku puzzles I have encountered. As a previous Amazon reviewer has noted, these strategies are simply explained with examples that allow you to solve any puzzle that is presented to you. I highly recommend this book.
Sudoku Dummy no longer!
11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 One of the Better Sudoku Books Out There Mar 07, 2008
By Erik J. Malvick
"Erik Malvick"
As a lot of people have, I have become a big fan of Sudoku lately. A problem with a lot of books out there for Sudoku is that they can have way too many easy puzzles for the more advanced Sudoku user or they don't quite follow the rules I find are important (an earlier book I owned required guessing to get to solve a puzzle in the more advanced stages, or they don't start out with symmetric patterns, which the more traditional sudoku start with).
This book is fantastic in that the puzzles start off challenging (this is not a beginners book). They incorporate more advanced techniques that one doesn't often find in books while not putting in techniques that are so advanced one would need a computer to use (This is a flaw in other books as well).
The only drawback. I've seen in the book is that some of the terminology is inconsistent with a lot of the seemingly official terminology seen on internet forums and puzzles. I'll also admit that I am not a huge fan of some of the variations presented in the book. They aren't necessarily bad, but I think it would have been neater to throw in a couple of Killer Sudoku or Samurai Sudoku puzzles to show some challenging variations.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Challenging puzzles and well-crafted instructions Nov 12, 2009
By Paul Weiss
What an absolutely marvelous idea for Sudoku addicts like myself! Andrew Heron and Andrew Stuart, the joint authors of this marvelous little puzzle compilation, explain the simple idea behind "Extreme Sudokuy for Dummies":
" ... If you find yourself breezing through most Sudoku puzzles without even breaking a sweat, then this is the book for you."
The puzzles in this marvelous little collection start at difficult and move to downright fiendish (and trust me here, fellow puzzle solvers, "fiendish" in this book means EXACTLY what it says!). The teaching section of the book takes you through the simplest gridlock busting techniques to the most complex. Most of the advanced techniques (at least, those that I'm aware of) are briefly and reasonably clearly explained in the opening pages but it takes solving the actual puzzles to switch on that "aha" light bulb, to come to understand how the technique is applied in a full puzzle and to see how it fits into the context of a developing solution.
Heron and Stuart cover an enormous range of puzzle solving techniques including:
Crosshatching
Single candidate squares
Single square candidates
Virtual crosshatching
Naked pairs, triples and quads
Row, column and box claims
Remote pair chains
Non-unique rectangles
Bivalue Universal Grave
X-wings, Swordfish and Jellyfish
XY-wings
XYZ-wings
Conjugate Pair Chains
Multi-colouring
XY-chains
This is NOT a puzzle book for beginners but if you're already a competent solver looking for challenges and a way to stretch your puzzle solving abilities with more esoteric techniques, then look no further than this delightful book. Highly recommended. Even if you're already an accomplished solver familiar with these techniques, you'll find the puzzles more than sufficiently challenging to justify the cost of the book.
A handful of jigsaw and killer sudoku variations will round out your pleasure and stimulate the old synapses with a little variety.
Paul Weiss
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Very Good Feb 18, 2011
By J Mason
Extreme Ducoku for Dummies is well written and as easy to follow as anything else I have read. However, I would have really liked it if the examples of the more complex methods had a couple more examples and write-ups. Some concepts are difficult to understand without more extended information.
See all 10 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
| | |
|
|
