HomeSudoku BooksMensa Guide to Solving Sudoku: Hundreds of Puzzles Plus Techniques to Help You Crack Them All |
|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 50 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
90 of 92 found the following review helpful:
Great but for the grid sizes Nov 22, 2006
By Lisa Brandt
As a sudoku addict who likes to work on hard to very hard puzzles, I really like this book -- it presents a number of advanced techniques, and it contains hundreds of puzzles that seem to run from slightly to very challenging (I haven't done them all yet).
However, a warning is in order: in spite of the large format of the book, six puzzle grids per page is unreasonable. Difficult puzzles require at least some marking up, and this requires space. The small grids are not user-friendly in this regard.
75 of 76 found the following review helpful:
 helpful, but hard to understand Aug 15, 2007
By Kimberly J. Annis
Maybe because I am not a genius, this book was hard to undertrstand. It has tons of puzzles and a plethora of techniques to guide someone in solving the hard sudoku puzzles. However, I needed to buy another book that dumbed it down a little. The 2nd book I bought was Mastering Sudoku Week by Week: 52 Steps to Becoming a Sudoku Wizard by Paul Stephens. This book is wonderful. It is easy to understand and still teaches the techniques to solving the extreme sudoku puzzles. Also, for Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku: Hundreds of Puzzles Plus Techniques to Help You Crack Them All (Mensa) there are 6 puzzles to a page and that is rather cramped. The harder puzzles require notes/candidate listing, which is nearly impossible with the size of these puzzles.
77 of 80 found the following review helpful:
Teaches great Sudoku solving techniques Sep 23, 2006
By BrianKremer
I am a total beginner at sudoku, but I had fun with the dozen or so puzzles I worked on this summer's fishing trip. So I just had to get a book on the subject... but which one? I decided it would be better to get a strategy book rather than just a puzzle book. I looked at several of them, but this one caught my eye, MENSA is smart people. They should know how to do sudoku real good, huh?
The author of the book is Peter Gordon who, according to the introduction, has been writing and editing puzzles for decades. The puzzles were all made by Wayne Gould, who runs sudoku.com. Wayne did not invent sudoku, Howard Garns did that in the late '70s. It didn't catch on in the U.S. at that time, but it did become popular in Japan, where they changed the rules slightly into what they are today. Wayne created a computer program to generate sudoku puzzles, and got the puzzles published in various English language newspapers. Hence, he was responsible for making sudoku popular in the United States here recently. Peter Gordon's family would always ask for his help with solving difficult sudoku puzzles. Because of that, he put together this book so that they would stop bothering him all the time.
There are 11 chapters in this book. Each chapter is dedicated to one or more related strategies for solving sudoku puzzles. Each chapter explains techniques for solving increasingly complicated puzzles. The chapters are "One-choice", "Scanning", "Elimination", "Subsets", "Interaction", "Candidate-free solving", "X-wing family", "Gordonian logic", "Forcing chains and grid coloring", "Bilocation and bivalue graphs", and "Guessing". At the end of each chapter there are 12 puzzles which may require the use of any of the techniques discussed in the book to that point. After the last chapter, there are pages and pages of puzzles... 800 puzzles alltogether.
Prior to reading this book, I already knew the "One-choice", "Scanning", and "Elimination" techniques. While reading the first several chapters, I figured out "Interaction" on my own. The rest of the techniques are great! Some are very complicated, but they all have one thing in common: working through the explanations and examples in the book give a more complete feel for the relationship between rows, columns, and boxes, and how cells with similar multi-number patterns are connected. Before reading this book, I was a complete beginner. Now I'm better, but I'm not sure how much better. And that leads to my first complaint about this book.
I wish the puzzles were rated as "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", or something like that. On the fishing trip, the puzzles we worked had 1 star if they were easy, on up to 5 stars for really hard ones. At that time I could solve an easy one in fifteen minutes or so. I'm up to puzzle 37 in this book right now, and these take a lot longer than 15 minutes to solve. I guess it's good that I can solve them at all, but it would be nice to know whether they are 3 star puzzles or 5 star puzzles. My only other complaint about this book is that after 2 weeks, the binding has already failed! It's a puzzle book... it really should be spiral bound.
Still, I am glad that I got this book instead of a book that only contained puzzles. I've learned a lot about sudoku, and I have hundreds of puzzles to work on... enough to last me a long while. And the price was ok, too.
Also, I recently got a cheapy sudoku puzzle book in the grocery checkout line, and I went straight to the hardest puzzles in the book and they were no problem... this book prepared me well!
33 of 34 found the following review helpful:
Does what it should but missed some details to really shine. Dec 07, 2006
By thailine
There's a section for each solving method: one-choice, scanning, elimination, subsets, interaction, candidate-free, x-wing, gordonian logic, chain forcing/grid coloring, bi-location/value graphs, and guessing. The topics are covered well. A number of puzzles requiring the techniques just taught follows each section. Additional puzzles follow the teaching section. Negatives: 1) (as another reviewer observed) the grid size really is a little small for the more complicated puzzles, 2) (as another reviewer observed) the binding is looking a little questionable even with careful use, 3) and my biggest gripe, no section on construction puzzles. I'd have liked to get some insight on constructing puzzles at specific difficulties. Specific difficulties with specific requirements (these numbers in these cells) would have been even better.
23 of 23 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent, Thorough Guide to Sudoku Apr 22, 2007
By Miami Reader
If you're looking to improve your Sudoku technique and are confused by the many books on the market, this is the one to get. Here's why:
Strengths: It starts with the basics and clearly explains all the techniques you'll ever need, including some that are very advanced. Topics include scanning, elimination, subsets, and interaction (the basics, which will enable you to solve easy to intermediate puzzles); the x-wing family (including swordfish), which will enable you to solve difficult puzzles; and advanced techniques such as Gordonian logic and forcing chains, which will enable you to solve very difficult puzzles that you'll rarely encounter. Even if you can't follow some of the advanced techniques, you'll still learn enough to do most puzzles. The author also includes a website that solves Sudoku puzzles, which will tell you if a puzzle can be solved by logic or if you have to guess. The program uses X-wing and swordfish, but I don't think it includes every advanced technique, so it may guess in some situations where an expert would not. But it is very helpful, since it includes an option to suggest the next step rather than proceeding directly to the solution.
Weaknesses: Yes, the grids are small. A simple solution is to copy each puzzle on a larger piece of paper, which will also preserve the binding. To me, the biggest weakness concerns the answers to the puzzles. The answers at the end of each chapter are okay, since you know that the puzzle deals with the contents of that chapter. But for the 700 or so puzzles at the end of the book, the author should have given the answers in stages, predicting where you're likely to get stuck and indicating what would help at that point (X-wing, swordfish, etc.). Of course, you can use the computer program to help you figure that out.
In sum: Don't be put off by the weaknesses. If I were teaching a course in Sudoku (and I am a teacher), I'd make this the required text.
See all 50 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
| | |
|
|
