Tag: go

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Beginning Go: Make the Winning Move by Peter Shotwell and Susan Long

This book is a nice 8×8, 160 page book. It’s attractive, with lots of white space and a simple declarative paragraph to introduce each concept. It has excellent exercises and is more traditional in their setup–a diagram creates a situation and a sentence asks you for a solution. At first, it’s a single stone placement that you’re imagining, but soon your solution assumes a few moves for each player.

This book is the one I’d hand to other people today to introduce the game. Despite that, ?I prefer The Rules and Elements of Go for a reminder–this is probably better for learning the game for the first time, and hopefully less intimidating with the problems and modern layout.

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Books

The Rules and Elements of Go by The Ishi Press

This book is responsible for thawing out my love and attempts at Go. It’s a small book (4″x7″), published in 1977. It does a great job of providing a broad overview of the game, explaining the rules, handicapping, and explaining score counting (and how it varies by country). That’s the first half of the book.

The second half is elementary tactics and strategy. Very compactly laid out, one page per problem, with several diagrams and explanations It’s really a nice primer… I should keep it at my side as a quick reference/reminder. The last 9 pages are a professional game, explained with a diagram showing 20-30 moves and a couple of paragraphs describing why. It’s a perfectly good example of a game, showing the abstract elements for the first 50 pages of the book in context.

There are a few odd formatting issues early very early on, but it’s actually very clearly organized, with plenty of diagrams. It’s a great example, despite its age.