Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: I thought this was an excellent book. Definitely a good purchase for anyone expecting a baby. After reading the other reviews I do have to suggest though that NO book will give you all the correct answers. Trial and error and learning about what is best for you and your baby is the only way. As for letting your baby cry itself to sleep... I agree with the other reviewers... I could not do it and I'm sure that's why baby slept through the night earlier than others I know and had fewer "night-time issues".
Rating: 
Summary: So-So
Review: I am not overly impressed with this book. Unlike during pregnancy I have/had NO time to read each chapter. "20-20" hind sight tells me I should have read cover to cover BEFORE delivery. Now it's too late. As a result I only use the book as a reference in an emergency at 3am. And even then if a topic is not in the index, forget it. The section in the back on illness is a great table of neatly laid out info and I really only use that nowadays. (FYI. My son is now 4+ months old.) I would have prefered something more organized on the "trouble shooting" sections, for example during week 3 when my son had exema looking in the 3rd (or 4th?) month for the info was a pain. I (obviously) hadn't read that far yet.
Rating: 
Summary: No one is perfect!
Review: I feel that this is an excellent book for first time parents. I found the first three months very helpful as I have never experienced life with a child younger than three months. As a infant/toddler child care provider, I know that children don't exactly follow their month by month format. But they also state that is is a month to month guide and that children develop at their own pace. I know children who begin walking at 8 months and completely skip crawling and I know of children who don't walk until they are 14 - 16 months. There is no normal when it comes to children. They develop at their own pace and often not within any guidelines. The section on what to do if your child is sick is very helpful as is the section on childhood illness. What I did is read the book and skipped over the sections I did not believe in. So if you feel co-sleeping is great, skip that section. I ear marked many sections so I could refer to them later. Even my husband reads this book!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource (especially for first-time moms)
Review: This book is great! It gives you lots of information about each month of your pregnancy. It also helps alleviate any concerns or worries you might have in a caring and informative manner. You never feel like your worries are stupid and being able to read this book is great because it's very well organized and talks about each stage clearly. I really loved having it with me to use as a reference book and also as a month-by-month information book.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay for medical issues, not for psychological ones.
Review: Although I liked their pregnancy book, What to Expect When You're Expecting, I really disliked this book. First of all, a month-by-month format is unrealistic for infant development. "Normal" development in infants varies a great deal--you CANNOT predict what will happen in a specific month. If your baby (like most) does not follow their month-by-month timetable, you can end up worrying for no reason (a baby who hits a milestone early has NO longterm advantage over one who hits a milestone late). Furthermore, the authors have very definite ideas that babies should be left to cry it out, even suggesting soundproofing the nursery. They say that you should not try to comfort your teething baby who is crying piteously in the night, and if you do they suggest you are being foolish. I prefer Sears and Sears' Parenting the Fussy Baby and High Needs Child, and The Baby Book, for information on infant care--the high needs book is especially reassuring, and also includes a critical chapter on avoiding mother burnout.
Rating:
Summary: Poor organization & dated material
Review: This book, unfortunately, is not the same quality as "What to Expect when You're Expecting". The information is okay but it has not been thoroughly updated. (Example: the current breastfeeding recommendation is 12 months, but the book says 6 months.) Moreover, it uses the month-by-month organization that the previous "What to Expect" book did. The month-by-month organization does not work when following baby's development. There is too much variability. For example, some babies will start crawling by the 4th or 5th month. Mine was almost 8 months old before she started. Example #2: Solids are covered in the 4th month chapter, however, you can start as late as 6 months. As a result, I had to consult several chapters to get all the information on a particular subject (sleeping problems, for example). Then I had to mark the pages so I could find it again later. Sometimes I could not find what I was looking for until after a lengthy search. (Let's see, would that be in the 2nd month or the 4th? Hmmm...not here...which chapter could it be?) It wasn't long before I looked for a new baby book. I've found "The Baby Book" by Sears & Sears to be excellent. The information is well-organized, quite current, and quite thorough. It is organized more by subject than by month, but it still has a list of suggested milestones for each month. There's also plenty of suggestions and real-life examples as experienced by the Sears and by their patients. I use it all the time and I haven't gone back to the "What to Expect the First Year" book even once!
Rating:
Summary: An excellent reference and source of information.
Review: This was the fourth baby care book that I have read and I found it to be by far the most thorough in answering the questions of a first-time parent. I was put off by some reviews that suggest it is not attachment parenting oriented but I borrowed it from a friend and feel that it is so invaluable that I now intend to buy my own copy! This book is not intended to give a child-rearing philosophy but provides all the practical information you need to know.
Rating:
Summary: It's Just Okay
Review: This book is sometimes helpful for referencing when you need to know a vaccination schedule or if you want to know smart your kid is when he's surpassed the "Might Even Be Doing..." section for his age. Other than that, I found it pretty UNhelpful. I disliked the arbitrary nature of the authors' advice on crying especially. In the advice for the first month they (rightly, in my opinion)advise the hypothetical questioner that it's impossible to spoil a newborn and that she should pick the baby up when she cries. But all of a sudden, by the third or fourth month, they're telling you that the baby is "manipulating" you and you'll need to harden your heart and let her cry it out. They even are subtly insulting to parents who don't let their children do so, implying that those parents are wimps. I also didn't like how they invalidated parents' choices that don't agree with typical Western childrearing practices. They really come down hard against co-sleeping especially, giving outdated reasons against it. I think a better approach would have been giving pros and cons, then giving safety measures to take, and trusting the parent to make his or her own choice. Also, the advice on breastfeeding is often medically inaccurate and disagrees with the AAP's recommendations regarding that practice. A better all-around childcare manual is the Baby Book or, if you're a Christian, The Complete Book of Christian Childcare, by the Sears. I appreciated the section on Best Odds recipes only after my son turned 1, because that was the first time when he could eat any of them!
Rating:
Summary: What to expect the first year
Review: I found some of the information helpful, but it lacked a lot of information that I felt as a first-time parent I needed. There were lots of helpful answers to questions people had, however, there were a lot of questions that I think are common everyday questions that were left out. I didn't care for it that much. I think overall, that it was not helpful for the information I was looking for.
Rating: 
Summary: Good as a medical and developmental reference, but...
Review: As a reference for medical and developmental aspects of the book - it is an excellent reference, but in terms of parenting, it falls flat. It recommends early weaning (10 months), poo-poos co-sleeping, gives confusing breastfeeding advice and basically underminds the reader's ability as a parent. If your looking for a comprehensive book, skip this one. (Try Dr. Sears).
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