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Rating: 
Summary: Good for GMAT preparation
Review: As a non-native English speaker, I had a hard time to improve my score in GMAT critial reasoning section. By accident, I found the "Informal logic" category in Amazon and ordered 6 books. After reading all 6 books, I found this book was the easiest to read and the clearest to understand the basic reasoning steps that GMAT asks in the test. Also, in general, this book is helpful for people who study English.
Rating:
Summary: Some of Walton's Best Work
Review: Douglas Walton is the most prolific writer on the subject of logical fallacies, and this book is a distillation of many years of teaching and writing on the subject up to 1989. While it presages his more recent theoretical works in the pragma-dialectical tradition such as A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy and The New Dialectic, you will get in this book an approach with substantial points of contact with good recent approaches like Govier's ARG approach to argument appraisal, or Damer's extension of it (which in the latest version of his Attacking Faulty Reasoning drifts a bit more in the pragma-dialectical tradition).I found his discussions to be quite illuminating. They are much more subtle than most, and he brings to bear on fallacy analysis a far richer toolbox of techniques drawn from logic, as well as rhetoric and communications studies. That being said, I don't think this would make a good text for an undergraduate course in critical thinking or informal logic--the methodology is too still too idiosyncratic, the distinctions too subtle. I'd go with Zachary Seech or Trudy Govier rather than Walton. On the other hand, this would be a good book for upper-level courses in informal logic for communication studies or journalism students. I think it deserves a place in the library of anyone teaching this material, but it's not the best place for someone approaching this material fresh to start at.
Rating: 
Summary: Beating dead horses
Review: I bought the book because a friend was reading it for a graduate level course and I was interested in the subject. After reading some of it, I applied glue to my eyes to keep them open, and read some more. I had to stop. Pure torture. I feel sorry for students whose teachers select this book. What specifically is wrong with the book? The author beats dead horses to a pulp. The subject is simple but the author is adroit at finding minutiae. Just one example, in section 2.4, he spends about 3.5 pages giving examples of and commentary on unreasonable questions (loaded, overly restrictive disjunctive, etc.). Very dry, very unnecessary...written for people with a poor ability to reason and infer. This book is not suitable for college level course work, let alone graduate level. But then again, I laughed at most of my classmates when I took an undergraduate philosophy course in symbolic logic (the other students were mostly from the liberal arts side of campus--I took the class because I had to fulfill some liberal arts requirements for a B.S. degree). Coincidentally, I was taking a digital logic design course. Funny: the subject matter we covered in philosophy over the whole semester took only 3 weeks in digital logic design. The students in the philosophy course would ask questions like, "could we go over that DeMorgan's theorem again", or, "I don't understand the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument", and make comments like "I still don't get this truth table thing." As you can guess, we beat a lot of dead horses in that philosophy class, too. My point: Maybe this is a suitable book by philosophy department standards. On the plus side, the author does use a collegiate vocabulary, which is too often rare in college texts these days.
Rating: 
Summary: Informal Logic
Review: I think tis book did help me to thunk better. i can now buy some stuff and not be ripped off. Because i did'nt understand all of it, i doesnt matter because i tried and it gave me confident to not be ripped off.
Rating:
Summary: Hey, I adopted it.
Review: Informal Logic exposes the reader to a formal analysis of their everyday thought. You will be able to use the material to recognize (and respond properly to) types of arguments and fallacies that previously had gone unrecognized. If you would like to become better at arguing your point, this is a good starting point.
Rating: 
Summary: Examining Induction
Review: There are a great many better books on fallacies and sophistry than this one. As one reviewer writes, it is over-written and tiresome in over-explicating cases. It's obvious that this book was written to accommodate the mass explosion of informal logic courses in some of our lesser-grade colleges. While the subject has been neglected over the years, and as yet, there's no single book that treats inductive reasoning and all the fallacies, there are many that are superior to this one. If this is the text used in your course, change courses.
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