Hi everyone! I’m Tony Yang (AGA 7D), a 16-year-old high school student from California. A while back, I created and published ScribeGo (an app that helps you study Go) on the app store which you may have heard of.
During these last couple of months, my teacher Han Han, a Chinese professional 5P whom you may have heard of before (took 1st place in the 2022 & 2023 U.S. Go Congress Masters Division and coached Kevin Yang 1P), and I have been writing a book called “The Theory of Go”:
From years of professional experience competing and teaching, this book presents seven essential lessons on Go theory that every player should know, alongside carefully chosen examples from professional games. From this book, readers will uncover the key principles that shape strategic thinking in Go and master how to choose their very next move.
We have compiled our playing and teaching experience into a comprehensive book recently published on Amazon. If you’re interested, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take a look at it on my website: https://tonyyang.vercel.app/.
On Amazon, we have a Kindle version and a paperback version currently released (hardcover will be coming very soon), and it is at a decent price compared to a lot of other Go books Link.
If you’re looking for a good Go book to read over the holidays, please feel free to give it a go and let us know what you think!
Thank you and happy holidays!
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It looks like a nice idea for a book, I’ve started reading the kindle version. Very reasonably priced
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I read the “sample chapter” in Amazon and, if you do not mind a suggestion, it is a bit sparse.
The content is good, however it is typeset in a way that I’d call “thesis content enhancer”, which makes most of the pages “foamy”.
This is your average “diagram page”. One diagram and very few lines of text (six-seven lines maximum). The whole book is 109 pages, which means the content is around 100 pages.
Comparatively this is a similar image from Richard Bozulich’s “Attacking and defending” the book is almost 200 pages.
If this was typeset in the same way as your book, it would have been 400 pages, for triple the price.
Another example of a similar “let’s explore the variations” book and something even denser is Invincible, The Games of Shusaku which is 415 larger pages:
You’d need around 8 pages to typeset that, which would have made that book 3200 pages long, with your typesetting options. At almost 50 dollars, I’d say that would be a great value for money
All in all, finding more examples, expanding more on them and making the book denser and longer, would make it much more “value for money” and more likely to be bought and suggested, instead of its competition.
Happy holidays to you as well
P.S.
Just a very small personal gripe, the Go board position on the cover seems totally unrealistic.
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This reminded me of the teaching materials format. Sometimes pages are deliberately left sparse with a lot of blanks for the specific purpose of asking questions, and then turning the page to find the answers (for teaching purposes, and leaving space for students to take notes). I haven’t seen the whole book, so I am not sure if it is a good use of space or not throughout. Just saying that sometimes it can be used effectively for Go textbooks.
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If you click on the amazon page, there is a sample of a few pages (which is quite a lot for a small book):
This way you can check it out and judge for yourself
Edit:
The screenshot I took from Bozulich’s book is exactly from the “answers” page of the concept you described.
If diagram 1 is the question page, and diagrams 1.1 1.2 for a general explanation where diagrams 1.3 1.4, and then 1.5 1.6 are listed together in answers pages would work (sometimes we would put them separately in the back or in another dedicated answer booklet). As for chapter 2 just 2 pages I cannot say much, just that it breaks the section in an intriguing place (why bring up group tax and stone scoring in a chapter about strong and weak groups as the intro section? Maybe an independent section about the history of Go would be better. Since I don’t know what’s next, it is hard to say how much content about the history is after this)
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I have no qualms with the content itself. I do not have the merit to judge something that was made by people that are so much better than me in playing Go and teaching Go.
I used to be a typesetter though, so I have some experience in order to comment on that.
And I do buy Go books so, as a potential customer, I am very interested in the “value for money” score of each book I plan on buying.
I am used to either very think Go textbooks where we have to photocopy pages just for handouts, or thin but multi-volume Go textbooks designed as teaching materials. And from my impression of the samples, I don’t think it is written as a textbook (for teaching), but more like after-class extra reading materials.
I am actually grateful that I saw a Go book try to bring the subjects for Go history in a casual way. Most are either very technical with no levity, or very serious in telling history chronologically. Usually, we have to splice in stories/histories and resume the serious teaching materials just for the limited time in class. However, I feel as a book, it has the leeway to tell more and make traditionally dry content more comprehensible (which is not always necessary, but I feel stories and histories do help students to build their own frameworks and understandings).
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