This book is a good buy over all. It has a good vocabulary list with good descriptions of what the words mean. The math section is week at times and should only be used by those who have not done math for a long time and want to brush up on their skills. A beter book for the math section is Barrons. The sample questions in this book are also very week and the test is a lot harder especially the quantitative part.

I was not impressed by either this book nor the GRE Literature prep book by the same company. I felt neither offered me any real boost in my scores. waste of money and time.

This book advertises on the cover that you will get free access to GRE tests online for practice purposed. When I try to login I just get an HTTP/404 error.

When I called tech support they told me that they no longer allow access to the website for my edition of the book (they want me to purchase the new 2006 edition). The book does not state anything about my edition (2004) expiring after a certain time, and nor does the website. What a rip off.

As many others have noted the book is passable, but the software attached to it for the computer simulated test is simply a disaster. Not only it sometimes ditches your whole test instead of grading it, it demands a registration (which results in a lot of spam), and the program didn't even adapt itself to my display format (i.e. you have to hold the "appropriate" display mode or part of the screen (including the crucial bottom buttons) will be offscreen. Considering I basically bought the book for the computer tests besides making it REALLY annoying to read the long texts with small font, this is just worthless and the work of complete amateurs. Granted the GRE is a silly test, but I would have expected some level of professionalism from those who describe themselves as experts. The book itself I found nearly worthless since the questions in it are too easy and you are simply not going to learn math and vocab from one single book in a rush.

First of all, the book (like most of its peers) is engineered to stretch a little content a long ways: many pages are blank or half-blank and taken up with formatting or repetition of previous material, the font and margins are huge, and the reader is frequently harrassed by condescending bullets like ``study your vocab!"; ``don't forget to go to the bathroom!" (o.k., not that one). I am not a fast reader, but I worked through this large 350 page book in 3 hours.

Second, I purchased the product in part because of the advertised 4 practice tests included on the CD-ROM. However, the software is incompatible with OS X. It is supposed to run in OS 9, but the program crashes when you try to take one of the tests.

Third, I found the verbal and math questions presented in the book to be much easier than those in the real computer-adaptive test. Of course that problem afflicts any preparation format in which the instruction and exercises are fixed independently of your level. But, it is worth pointing out that this book will be of little help to you if you are predisposed to score fairly well.

The books produced by ETS have sharper questions, which are extracted from past exams.

It is unfortunate that academic admissions (as, increasingly, public education as a whole) depends so heavily on the standardized testing racket. People could instead be doing something of benefit to themselves and to society.