Rating: 
Summary: Great prep guide
Review: My first comment about this book is that it isn't the actual book prepared by the ETS, the company that prepares the actual book. You may want to get this book in addition to the other one. With that being said, I feel this book is still quite good.
This book has a theory that the GMAT score, and score takers can be broken down into three buckets, low, medium, and high. Therefore specific preparation is broken down into three buckets.This book starts out as a basic guideline of what is tested, some theory behind the test, and some basic things you may need to review you upon. Each type of question is examined, and has many practice examples. Next, you will get a pretest, and it will show you in which bucket of questions you may fall into. The english and the math are then broken down into sections that have easy, medium, and then the most difficult questions. This way you concentrate in the level where you have the most success. Since the breakdown is done this way, if your on the high end of the scoring range, this book may not be the best match for you. Otherwise this book might be exactly what you are looking for. I really liked that there was specific coaching done on each type of questions, the pretest, and then the brakedown of questions into easy, medium, and hard. This way you could study and see the progression of how well you are/were doing.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent, but not great
Review: My friends made it sound like this book was The Bible for GMAT prep. This was the first book that I bought, and it definitely helped. But by the end I felt like I had only gained a rudimentary understanding of the material. The material was very basic, and by the end I felt like I needed more practice problems. The comments on here about the CD ROM being buggy are true, too. I found that it was really unpredictable in my PC, and the CD contained some mistakes.
Rating:
Summary: Data Sufficiency Methods Are Excellent
Review: Princeton Review's GMAT data sufficiency methods are simple yet work well. Many students have difficulties with the Data Sufficiency questions. In my experience, they encounter difficulties not necessarily because the math content is so difficult, but because they have not done this type of question before, and do not have a systematic method for doing so. Princeton Review's method -- breaking the answer choices into two categories --AD/BCE -- plus looking for the "missing piece" of information, works. Simple, but it works. Many students believe that the Data Sufficiency questions are complex, and, that to tackle these questions, they need complex methods. I disagree. The rest of the book is relatively straightforward. I agree with another reviewer that the CD-ROM is so-so. Get your hands on ETS' PowerPrep, which, last time I checked, was available for free via the mba.com website.
Rating: 
Summary: Have to agree with the negativity
Review: The book is OK and teaches similar techniques to taking the GMAT. I, like most, selected this for the tests on CD. As many have said before, the tests on the CD are awful. My primary complains are: 1. There aren't enough questions stored to allow you to take mutually exclusive tests. You'll regularly get the same questions on full test simulations and section specific programs. I actually think that there are only 3 reading comprehension paragraphs on the whole disk, meaning that they are repeated in each test. 2. The questions sometimes have the wrong answers. I wish I could insert a screen shot here of the questions I recorded as wrong. When reviewing a test (which is possible, contrary to one of the other reviewers statements), the software shows you how they came up with their answer. For example, the test scored a question as the wrong answer, but the explanation showed the answer I picked as correct. Another example, a math question specifically says X and Y are positive integers. In the explanation of the answer, Princeton eliminates a possible answer by substititing -1 for x and -2 for y. So if the test can say I got a question wrong when I got it right, I'm sure it can work the other way. After working with this program, I have no confidence that Princeton's program actually scores the test appropriately. 3. The timer - the 45 minute clock on my laptop takes about 36 minutes, and about 27 minutes on my desktop. Maybe time moves differently at Princeton, but I like 45 minutes to = 45 minutes. So, if you like princeton, buy the book without the CD rom and save the money.
Rating:
Summary: Book is so-so and CD is bad
Review: The tests in the CD are bad, I took 3 of them and it repeated several questions - including the texts for reading comprehension, they were the same in the 3 tests! I also found some answers keys that were certainly incorrect.
The book helps you to get on the road and gives some helpful hints. Nevertheless, its style is not academic, and it lacks depth in mathematics and grammar.
Overall, if you are targeting to the top MBA's, then you will need a score around the 700's (or higher), and this book will not be enough.
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, bad practice
Review: This is a great intro to what the GMAT will be like. The math techniques are great - they can save alot of time.
CD testing stinks. I could barely read the questions because of the font, the timer seemed to go very quickly (I started the same time my wife began a 30 minute TV show, and my time was out before her show finished), and it didn't give me a score - I have no idea what my GMAT score would be. Oh well, for 30 bucks, it was worth the intro to GMAT - plus I used free shipping and got it in 2 days.
Rating:
Summary: Don't bother
Review: This was the first GMAT book I purchased and I worked with it for about a month until I got the Official GMAT Guide from ETS. The difference is like night and day. While the ETS guide condenses all you need to know into straightforward summaries, the Princeton Review book is very roundabout and confusing. When a book resorts to creating imaginary characters ("Joe Bloggs") to explain questions, you know something isn't right. Not only are the explainations sometimes not very clear, they often take the longest route to the solution. The book appears to be written for those who are a long time removed from any sort of academic setting, and thus instead of teaching fundamental principles of grammar and math it instead waters them down so they're easier to understand, but also harder to apply. Given this, if you have some grounding in mathematics and english and are looking for a refresher, avoid this book. I honestly learned more in 5 pages of the ETS review guide then I did in 200 pages of the Princeton Review GMAT guide. If you are looking for a book to introduce you to basic princples of math and grammar in really (over) simple language, then this is the book for you. But in my frank opinion, if this book is of moderate difficulty or higher for you, you shouldn't be taking the GMAT.
Rating: 
Summary: CD-ROM is buggy
Review: Though the content of the book itself is not bad, the CDROM that is included with it and that is supposed to simulate a real GMAT CAT is >>>COMPLETE GARBAGE<<<. The timers on the questions are wrong. Instead of giving you 75 mins for each section, they give you 30 and 45 mins for the verbal and quant sections respectively. I noticed several of the questions in the quant section have incorrect answers programmed (e.g. the real answer is D but software is programmed for B) the skewing your test results. These are simply inexcusable errors that would have been caught with simple testing. Whoever was in charge of Quality Control for the CD should be fired for failing to do their job.
Rating: 
Summary: The Princeton Review is Very Accurate
Review: While I used the Official GMAT as the core of my study efforts, this book is a great supplement, it helps you understand how to think about the questions. I highly recommend using this, I think it helped me with my prep for the GMAT
Rating:
Summary: A great supplement to the Official GMAT
Review: While I used the Official GMAT as the core of my study efforts, this book is a great supplement, it helps you understand how to think about the questions. I highly recommend using this, I think it helped me with my prep for the GMAT
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