Book appears adequate to the task of GRE prep. Kaplan is generally the benchmark for prep books. We'll see how the test goes.

I was pleased with how quickly I received my order and at such a low price. I would buy from this seller again.

Kaplan's GRE book, as many other reviewers have noted, is considerably more annoying and less comprehensive in its coverage than Barron's "How to prepare for the GRE test". Although the book is an impressive 352 pages long, much of the space on those pages is blank or taken up by facile "tips" such as "Your opinion of the test doesn't matter. Your score does." (No, really?)

Despite announcing at the beginning of of chapter 1 that it will cover "practically everything that's ever on the GRE", both the verbal and maths sections are weak compared to other GRE prep books and software on the market, with fewer examples that tend to be on the easy side. There are some notable exceptions - Kaplan's verbal tests on the CD threw some words at me that were way more obscure than anything that came up on the actual GRE, and there were a few quite difficult reading comp questions. Having said that, those who are already getting verbal scores in the 600s and are aiming higher will find Kaplan's word lists inadequate and should not be mislead by the book's assertion that knowing the general sense of a word is okay - for the harder questions on the GRE you need to know the exact meaning.

However, if you're after a top score and money is not an issue, this book is probably worth buying solely for the CD. The CD has 3 full length tests (including analytical writing) which are a pretty good simulation of the real thing, as well as 6 additional verbal and quantitative tests. Having recently taken the GRE, I can say that doing these tests was extremely helpful, partly for the content (all the answers for the non-CAT tests are worked so that you can see where you went wrong), but mostly because the tests are both computer based and punishingly timed. For me, one of the biggest challenges was learning when to keep working at a question and when to guess and move on before I ran out of time. I also found the CD's verbal and math lessons quite useful. While they are thinner on concrete content than Barron's book, the tutorials are often quite funny and include genuinely useful strategies and ways of thinking about problems that I found helpful on the actual test. There is also less posturing and shameless Kaplan-self-promotion on the CD than in the book.

Despite the fact that the book's tone got on my nerves, the CD formed an integral part of my GRE prep program, along with Barron's book and the ETS issued powerprep software. I ended up getting 800 verbal and 770 quantitative - there's no such thing as too many practice tests!

A complete waste of money. Not of time, because it is so short that you can master it in one week.

I wrote a review for Barron's, which is better and cheaper.

Maybe the best is the CD, but I already had it, so buying it has not been an aid for me. I haven't tried the Barron's CD, so I cannot compare them.

I found this to be a terrific resource. I scored abysmally low on the diagnostic test and was therefore insanely motivated to study. The book is helpful to carry around and practice with. I could study at the pool and I could study while my children took ice skating lessons - more convenient than carting around the laptop. I found the book's explanations to be better in some areas than the computer's and vice versa. I'm glad I did both.

The games were stupid and didn't help at all.

The flash cards were extremely useful.

I had only about 4 weeks to prepare so I spent at least two hours (sometimes more) every day studying - either with the book or with the CD-ROM. I even took several of the math tests a couple of times - just choose to wipe out your earlier score.

The strategies REALLY helped. I found myself doing the math problems the "hard way" and the Kaplan method really helped me recognize which tricks to use to make things easier.

The Analytical Writing preparation also helped enormously. The 5-step approach gave me a way to organize my thoughts in a systematic way each and every essay. My only small complaint was that my real GRE essay questions were more open-ended than the Kaplan ones; and, more based on individual feelings and opinions (not fact-based) Wish Kaplan had given me some guidance on how to approach those kinds of essays.

The Kaplan CAT test turned out to be easier than the real GRE. But, you know what?... scoring really well on the Kaplan test the night before the real one gave me all kinds of confidence. When the questions on the real test seemed to be really hard, I just supposed it was because I was doing really well.

Face it, most of us will never have to use those words again in any kind of everyday conversation. And, outside of math and engineering disciplines, I'll never have to know the area of a triangle again!

One other piece of advice --- if you know a 7th-grader in Pre-Algebra or Algebra, have them sit with you while taking some of the sample quantitative tests --- they can show you all the tricks(!)