Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive, and unique.
Review: The Eyewitness Travel guide series offers the best system in travel guide books. The Paris guide is no exception. These books include everything. Street maps, metro maps, museum prices, times, information on EVERYTHING. I left to study abroad in Paris last year, and spent lots of money on essentially useless guidebooks. The only one I used, and the only one I should have saved room for in my suitcase was the Eyewitness guide. I used it my entire semester, finding new things in it all the time that I wanted to see, and just as an essential tool in Paris. The first couple of days, the Metro map was indespensable. This guidebook is one that should not be left at home. It offers hotels, restaurants, museums, and pictures of nearly everything, to boot. I guarantee that this guidebook will not let you down. The Eyewitness guides are all you need, and all I will ever purchase in the future for my travel guidebook needs. Enjoy Paris! Bon Voyage.
Rating:
Summary: The best
Review: The DK Eyewitness Travel Guide series is always top notch, the Paris book being a sterling example. My 2001 edition was acurate with opening/closing times for sights, great maps, interesting pictures, helpful informaton, good layout & design. Besides the intricacies of the city, outside sites like EuroDisneyLand or the Palace of Versailles are covered well.
Perhaps boderline as to whether it is a little too heavy to carry around all day, you must have it and take it with you at least as far as the hotel.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent travel tool!
Review: My wife and I went to Paris on our honeymoon and we had a fantastic time in that glorious city. One of the things that helped us enjoy more and that helped us take advantage of all the city has to offer was having this travel guide. The Eyewitness travel guides are a step ahead of any other series of travel books because it not only includes the same information that the other have, but they also include additional information that is really great to know and have while abroad. This guide has all the usual bits about he city: the top sites to visit (including work hours so as not to get there when they're closed!), how to move around (info on buses, Le Metro, trains, taxis, you name it), lists of shops and restaurants (with different price ranges and organized by location)and great street maps. It also has historic information on the city, which truly enriched our visit by helping us appreciate the places and sites we were visiting. However, the greatest thing about the guide were the "walk routes", helpful suggestions on ways how to best go site seeing. Even if you don't follow them completely, they give you great ideas on where to go. It also includes lots of information on sites outside of Paris, which are great to visit if you have the time. All in all, an excellent travel tool!
Rating:
Summary: Best one-volume travel series
Review: The Eyewitness Travel Guide series is my favorite series in the if-you-could-only-take-one-book-what-would-it-be category. Others may be more comprehensive (Lonely Planet, for example) or better suited to particular topics or interests. But if you're going to, in this case, Paris, for a week or two, and you know you want to see the major sites and some out-of-the way places too, this is your book. What is unique about these books? This book has beautiful photos, but so do the Insight Guides. It lists lots of things and places to see, do, eat and stay, but don't they all? Two things set this series apart: organization and maps. The guide organizes itself according to areas of the city. This does not necessarily break down according to "arrondisement," but in a way that is more useful to the tourist. Its sections organize things to see and do by location and neighborhood, which makes planning schedules yourself much easier, as opposed to following suggested schedules (which invariably contain stops you aren't interested in) or having to flip from the museum section to the parks section to the monuments section to the churches section and trying to figure out which ones to see on the same day. This is made even easier by the maps. In addition to excellent conventional maps of the city, this guide has drawings that show axonometric, aerial views of neighborhoods, with building-by-building, house-by-house depictions of what the neighborhoods look like and how they are laid out. You can see how the things you want to see in that neighborhood are situated in relation to each other. It's like getting a helicopter tour of that neighborhood before you arrive on the ground. No other guidebooks have this feature. I think the combination of the neighborhood organization layout and these unique maps (which are right in the relevant sections) make day planning a breeze and even fun. On the negative side for some, the restaurants and lodgings are in separate sections. I don't find this is a problem. I'm not going to be looking for a place to stay every night while I'm sightseeing anyway--I figure out the one place I'm staying in advance and use that as my base. And we often plan dinner locations separately from rest of the day's activities and wing it for lunch. So I consider the separation of the lodging and restaurant sections to be an advantage. But if you like to plan all your meals in advance in the same neighborhood you'll be sightseeing in, or plan to wander up and down the streets looking for a new hotel every day, or a recommended restaurant in the 'hood, you'll have to do a bit of flipping back and forth between sections. This is a great trip planning tool, and with its beautiful photos and smashing map/aerial drawings, it will get you excited about your upcoming trip, too.
Rating:
Summary: The ultimate, up-to-date travel guide to Paris
Review: I just returned from a 10 day trip to Paris and cannot tell you the number of times we had this book in our hands, scouring the pages for those nooks and crannies of the city which we would have missed without the guide! How complete, how accurate, how easy to use. The maps were up to date. The descriptions of the sights in the city were filled with historical facts, as well as colorful pictures to whet your appetite. I would recommend anyone travelling to Paris to use this guide. It was the most popular guide we saw visitors using while touring the city.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible! A Must-Have for those who truly wants to....
Review: ...experience Paris. It is a dream to use, very clear and user-friendly. The street-by-street maps were invaluable. There were also detailed maps and descriptions of individual sites (like museums, and Versailles) which guided you through the highlights of those sites. I would use it constantly, so it was hardly ever in my bag. Even my husband, who is anti-guidebook, used it too! We ended up seeing and enjoying more of Paris than I could ever have imagined beacuse of the detail included in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Best Travel Book for Paris
Review: I used almost this entire book while in Paris. The book gives great "walk routes" to make sure you see everything (for example, it features a walk through Pere Lechaise Cemetary). While you walk, it points out areas of interest and tells of the history. It also tells you which metro stop to get off, so all the areas in Paris and surrounding area are easily accesible. I will use this book again next time I visit France. If you dig old castles, check out Fontainebleau Castle, which is about an hour train ride out of Paris. This is the ultimate book for Paris travelers. It even has a "french phrase insert" for easy translation and speaking. This was my first time to Paris, I was meeting my best friend there, and for the most part I was alone and was not lost because of this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Useful info but almost impossible to use
Review: The book is a cute, appealing size. It lists many good bars, places to eat etc. But it has a major flaw: No matter how hard I searched through the book, I didn't see any mention of arrondissements, which are the various numbered neighborhoods. Everyone in Paris and every map uses these numbers to direct you. "It's in the 14th." for example. Well, with this book I had to constantly reference other maps then locate the street and see which arrondissement the place was located in. I'm not just venting. I was really disappointed I had depended on this book as my only resource. Additionally, because it combines neighborhoods - I assume to save space so it can maintain a petite, portable size - that is confusing as well and also prevented me from being able to map the named neighborhood to the arrondissement. My recommendation? Bring this book only if you can bring another. It's really not worth the price considering the hassle.
Rating:
Summary: I carried it with me every day...
Review: I just returned from my first visit to Paris, and I took this book with me everywhere I went. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The maps helped me find everything, and the information was helpful, and fun to read! It was actually fun to walk around and see how many other people also had this book... turns out tons of people carried it with them, as I saw it every day in someone's hands. Get this book for your next visit... it's worth every penny.
Rating:
Summary: A great aid for first time visitors to Paris
Review: It has LOT of information that at first may look overwhelming to anyone that wishes to visit Paris in a short period of time, however, its friendly design (divided by city area), its comprehensive page layout (including easy to view graphics, pictures and maps) and its "must see" lists per area make it easy to select the important places for any visitor (we very much enjoyed Pompidou's modern art but most Paris visitors seek classics instead).
This book provided us with the essential information to make the most of our visit considering our time constraints, if time is no problem to you, in dept information is also included in such detail that we were sometimes better informed than parisians themselves.
My wife and I do not like carying anything while we visit(not even a small back pack). The heavy ammount of information provided cannot be light in weight (I know we are very picky on this issue) but the book size will fit confortably in most purses.
In Summary: It is an essential aid for first time visitors to Paris, and it is even compact in size (easy to cary) and easy to read (consider that English is my second language).
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