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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent fun!
Review: I love puzzles, but usually stay away from these "test your IQ" books (most of them are just ego trips for geeks). I picked this book up at the store, flipped through it, and fell in love with it. Yes, there's a scoring system, but the author makes it clear that's not the point. The puzzles are clever and well presented, and the overall format of the book is perfect. An excellent book for people who like keeping their minds sharp.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent fun!
Review: I love puzzles, but usually stay away from these "test your IQ" books (most of them are just ego trips for geeks). I picked this book up at the store, flipped through it, and fell in love with it. Yes, there's a scoring system, but the author makes it clear that's not the point. The puzzles are clever and well presented, and the overall format of the book is perfect. An excellent book for people who like keeping their minds sharp.
Rating: 
Summary: Very enjoyable but a little formulaic
Review: This is a very enjoyable little book. I have used some of the examples (involving pattern matching) in teaching students the bones of computer based reasoning. The questions are mostly good to challenging in quality. However as you plough through the tests, a pattern begins to emerge (somewhat like learning to unravel cryptogram based crosswords) and I suspect this helps improve performance. The one quibble I have is that the wording of questions is not always clear - perhaps one to two in every fifteeen questions. Just to check this for myself I asked my wife, who is the sharpest blade in our household, to look at a few that I found unclear. She agreed (surprisingly ;-). It is worthwhile digging out the GRE general test for comparison on this point, and you'll readily grasp the importance of clarity in question wording. That being said, it is a worthwhile book and I derived a good deal of satisfaction from it.
Rating:
Summary: Very enjoyable but a little formulaic
Review: This is a very enjoyable little book. I have used some of the examples (involving pattern matching) in teaching students the bones of computer based reasoning. The questions are mostly good to challenging in quality. However as you plough through the tests, a pattern begins to emerge (somewhat like learning to unravel cryptogram based crosswords) and I suspect this helps improve performance. The one quibble I have is that the wording of questions is not always clear - perhaps one to two in every fifteeen questions. Just to check this for myself I asked my wife, who is the sharpest blade in our household, to look at a few that I found unclear. She agreed (surprisingly ;-). It is worthwhile digging out the GRE general test for comparison on this point, and you'll readily grasp the importance of clarity in question wording. That being said, it is a worthwhile book and I derived a good deal of satisfaction from it.
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