I'm not good with standardized tests, but this guide helped me to see what areas I needed to improve and taught me how to study for a complicated test.

Admittedly, the book has a few glitches and can make a non-math person feel stupid at times, but the advice and strategies for the quantative part were logical and well explained.

The 3500 word list was essential for mastering the verbal, and the excercises helped me to see the answers the test makers have in mind.

The book gives excercises that are more difficult than those on the GRE website. If you can do the Barron's excercises and practice tests, you are ready for the test.

The additional CD also helped me to visualize the test and contained good practice excercises.

I am pleased with my results and would recommend the book to anyone seeking to prepare for the GRE.

This is definitely one of the best preparation guides I used for the GRE. The Math section was especially helpful to me. Instead of generic strategies, the book gives me many practicle math shortcuts which I found to be essential in tackling time constraint.

The book also provides a pretty comprehensive vocab list and numberous exercises for both verbal and math. The only downside of this book is the CD-a useless supplement to an otherwise fantastic review book.

This study guide gave me a good overview of the types of questions I'd be facing from all the different sections of the GRE. The CD practice tests helped me prepare for a testing format I hadn't ever experienced before as well. And I don't know whether this was planned, but I did horribly on almost all of the practice tests I took. I even found myself getting low scores on the math sections and I'm an engineer. I even considered postponing the actual test. However, I ended up scoring higher than I'd ever anticipated on the actual test.

Barron's GRE book is the best. In addition to Barron's, I used different books suc as Kaplan and Princeton review. I found that if you study this Barron's book diligently, you can do very well on your GRE test. The 3500 word list is very very very helpful.

The quantative questions may be harder than the actual exam. However, if you can master these questions, you should do well on the actual test.

All in all, it's an excellent book. Please give yourself two months as there are a lot of material to be learned and studied.

This Barron's guide to the GRE probably has equivalent information and study tips to the other GRE guides that are available, making it an acceptable guide. This especially applies to the Verbal Ability section and the diagnostic and model tests. The 3500-word dictionary of brainiac words is also useful but takes forever to get through if you tackle it from a study angle. The biggest problem with this guide is the Quantitative (math) Ability section, in which complex solutions are difficult to read and sometimes contain errors and typos. Take this example: "x+.25x=1.25x=2000=>y=2000/.75=2666.67." Now imagine that crammed into the middle of a paragraph containing various fonts and typefaces - and this example doesn't even contain square roots, exponents, fractions, or other hard to read symbols. Add to that some flat-out errors (see some of the other reviews here for examples) and the Quantitative section presents some difficulties. The Analytical Ability section falters in some places as it tries to explain how you should "infer" or "deduce" answers. I found myself just plain disagreeing with some of the answers in the Analytical section, with no explanation as to why I should agree with the guide's answer. One final humbug in this edition is the 2-page synopsis on the new Analytical Writing portion of the test, which is hidden at the end of the book after about 140 pages of model test information.

This guide will surely help you practice adequately for the GRE, but the presentation leaves a little to be desired. Also, you can buy this book with the optional CD-ROM, which gives tips on the current computer-based version of the test. If you have at least competent computer skills, the CD-ROM is unnecessary, so skip it and save some money.