Rating: 
Summary: The best primer to Go
Review: This 1972 book by Kauro Iwamoto is the single easiest and best book for learning the game of Go. The subjects cover all that is needed for the beginner to this game to learn and quickly grasp the fundamentals of the game. Includes a demonstration game on a 9X9 board as well as 2 of Kauro's own games,from 1949 vs Kitani and from 1926 against Honinbo Shusai. I have learned more about Go from this book than any other.
Rating:
Summary: superb introduction
Review: This classic text is a wonderful introduction to the game. I especially enjoy the problems sprinkled throughout the book. They make for great subway/bathroom diversion, while building intuition for the game.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book for getting started with the game.
Review: This is a pretty good book for learning the game. It covers all the rules and many elementary tactics as well as a little bit of strategy. The book is easy to understand and follow. I thought it was slightly overwhelming though. Everything was described a little too concisely. That is, I could only read 10-20 pages at a time before I was overloaded with information. What I liked most about the book was that the chapters were broken up by problem sections which tested one's understanding of the material just covered.
Rating:
Summary: excellent book for beginning go player
Review: This is an excellent book for starting your exploration of the fascinating oriental strategy game of Go (WeiQi in China, Baduk in Korea). There are many levels of strategy in Go, to begin to understand the higher levels, you must master the beginning levels by study and play against players of similar or somewhat stronger strength. This book will get you started and continue to offer new insights for several months to a year of intensive playing.
Rating: 
Summary: There are much better beginner's books available now.
Review: This is an old outdated book. It is slightly better than some of the original beginner's books by Laskey, Smith, and others. There a far better books available. Janice Kim's "Learn to Play Go" is an excellent example. Please note that I have the greatest respect for Iwamoto. His book was the best English language beginner's book when it first appeared.
Rating: 
Summary: A thorough introduction, but hard to swallow
Review: This was my first book on go. There's no question that it has all the information anyone could ever need to get started playing what I consider the greatest game in the world. However, for most Westerners, the material is very difficult to digest. I believe there are a couple of reasons for this: first, remember that this is one of the top players of the last century, writing a book for beginners. He's lost some of the appreciation for the hefty learning curve the game imposes on the uninitiated. It can be discouraging when he tells you how "easy" some of this stuff is (which, of course, is true once you understand it, but not at first). Second, as some have noted, the book is "concise." I might go a step further and call it "dense." I like this quality in books I read now (as a better player), but as a beginner, it was tough. Third, Iwamoto takes a bottom-up approach, which probably works for some, but left me missing the forest for the trees. A section typically begins with an example (board diagram), and says "In this situation, White needs to play at X, or Black will capture three stones at Y." The principles behind the examples tend to be glossed over, and without a background in the game, I had no idea how to generalize. Eventually, I did in fact absorb all this material, even without a mentor to help my play along. With the benefit of hindsight, however, I find Janice Kim's "Learn To Play Go" series much, much easier to digest at the beginner level. True, Iwamoto covers in one book what Kim covers in four, but the first two suffice to get you rolling without banging your head against the wall (important if we're going to spread the GOspel throughout the West).
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