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Rating: 
Summary: very well written but beware print quality
Review: i purchased this book based on the reviews here and overall i agree that it's well written and presents the grammar clearly and thoroughly. my one complaint is with the print quality. at times it looks like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, which can be quite annoying when trying to puzzle out the arabic. [contrast the much nicer but unfortunately unvowelled arabic in Thackston's book.]also, the exercises are of dubious usefulness, since they mostly consist of translating stilted sentences such as "The foreign traveller mounted a swift camel and escaped. For two months he drank camel's milk, and found it very bitter, because he was used to cow's milk." [unfortunately all too typical in traditionally-minded language textbooks: compare Moreland and Fleischer's Latin book, with gems such as "After the torches had been carried into the city gates, the king was able to show the lofty walls to the guests from the province who had come to learn the art of fortifying towns"!!]
Rating: 
Summary: The best grammar for learning Modern Standard Arabic
Review: If you want to learn how to read and write Modern Standard Arabic, or develop a base for Classical Arabic, this is simply the best there is. I cannot recommend it too highly. I wasted a couple years trying to struggle through other books, especially Thackston and Schulz, and got nowhere in spite of having had experience with difficult languages in the past. The difference with Haywood cannot be more extreme; from the very first day I made rapid progress. If it weren't for Haywood, I would still not know Arabic. The explanations and examples are very clear--as clear as they can be in a language as different from English as Arabic is. I have friends who are forced to learn with other books in their classes, and repeatedly turn to Haywood to understand what's really going on. It is true that the exercises are sometimes simple (as noted in another comment), but this is because Arabic is a Semitic language and therefore less intuitive than other Indo-European language (like Latin). It's a common frustration of intermediate students of Arabic to face sentences where they know all of the words but still don't know what it means--to bridge the differences between English and Arabic, the authors have to take translation more slowly. This book is comprehensive enough to take the student from no knowledge at all to an advanced intermediate level, where one can start reading widely in Arabic literature (though somewhat laboriously at first). It teaches a large and useful vocabulary of over 4000 words. And because the explanations are so clear and rigorous, it is also a good first-step reference grammar. Later chapters review and provide greater detail to subjects that are sometimes more confusing, like Arabic's numerous particles, many of which look very similar. A note on print quality: on occasion it can be fairly bad. Usually it's just the voweling marks that are obscured, however, and this is only annoying in the beginning, before one develops a sense of what patterns of vowels are common. There are also some typos, but none (that I have found) that really impede understanding. Again, I can't recommend this book highly enough. If I had never come across it, I would have never learned Arabic.
Rating:
Summary: As good as Arabic grammar can be.
Review: This book is technical and a bit dated, but its content and clarity is easy to follow. Unless you have a few years of formal grammar it can be difficult because the terminology and rhetoric may require some explaining by an instructor. It is knit picky with the details in Arabic so if you can use the language well but feel like you lack a strong grammar base then this book is perfect for you.
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