Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

( bought this book on another account ) I had high hopes for this book but unfortunately it suffers from the same lack of instruction that most " how to" books fall victim to. First of all the order of chapters seems to be very counter intuitive. An example of this is the division and mirroring of planes chapter. It tells you how to divide a plane but it doesn't tell you to be aware of distortion when doing so ( I had to figure that out on my own ). After it shows you how to divide it, it tells you to mirror a plane but when it does it just says " draw a rectangle and perpendicular mirror plane". Okay do they mean a rectangle in perspective? And if so, with 2 vanishing points or 1? It's the assumptions they make of the user that isn't conducive to teaching. This issue would have been alleviated with just a few extra words in their instructions. Another example is the mirroring of tilted planes. It specifically says " constructing a perspective grid is essential in determining where the planes fall in space" but guess what, that chapter isn't until LATER in the book. To me, that doesn't make sense. Also, a perspective grid is essential for aiming to vanishing points off the page but It doesn't tell you that almost all the examples in the book are made with vanishing points OFF the page. The perspective grid seems really crucial to me, but they don't bother with that until later in the book ( a chapter after the planes chapter but it would have been awesome to know before hand ). This book isn't for beginners. It assumes you know how to determine the degrees of the cone of vision, which is required to make an accurate perspective grid ( what? see above ). This is odd to me since a protractor isn't in the materials list. How to determine the degrees of a cone of vision issue was brought up in the forum they made to " add to the teaching experience of the book" but neither author ( or moderator ) has addressed the issue. The forum is dead ( granted it's 2 years old but there was hardly any feedback to begin with ). This book makes me very weary of getting their "how to render" book since I'm afraid I'll get stuck due to ambiguity of the text and assumptions. A teacher should never assume a student knows something that hasn't been taught yet. Yet another example of them not giving pertinent information is seen in the mirroring of a vertical plane. They just say draw a vertical rectangle. They don't even have the courtesy to tell you that the example they have in the book ( which is what most people would look to for reference to see if theirs looks correct like theirs) is actually in 3 POINT perspective ( I took a ruler to their lines ). It's obvious that the reviews that praise this book to high glory are rigged to do so. In closing, you'll learn some but it requires a lot of deciphering of what they want you to do ( and what the text is not telling you about the examples ) . The book isn't clearly written and poorly designed. P.S: They should have added video content for the essential construction pages ( cone of vision, mirroring etc )