This is the first book in Yutopian's Pocket Skills Series. This is a series of books by Yang Yilun that are small enough to fit in your pocket (4 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches, and the book fits in the pocket of my jeans); they're supposed to improve your reading ability and to help you reach dan level, and they're somewhat cheaper than other go books. This one is about rescuing and capturing stones; it consists of 80 problems, 40 on rescuing and 40 on capturing. There's one problem per sheet of paper: the problem is on the front, and the solution is on the back.
I thoroughly enjoyed working through the problems. I'm an AGA 2kyu; I found them not too hard but not so easy as to be boring, and I suspect that most kyu-level players who have worked through Tesuji would get something out of this. (This book is nowhere near as difficult as Yang's Life and Death problem books.) The format works well for me, too: it can be a real problem when go books give you too many problems in a row before showing you the answers, and this book certainly avoids that. Some people may balk at buying a book with only 80 problems in it, though.
Click here to see Yutopian's blurb about the book.
Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:59:26 PDT 2003