Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Basic information for beginners but some stuffing and vague about important detail in parts

Customer Rating:

A standard work often provided in starter kits and it covers the basics in a simple easy to read fashion. Katie Thear is an experienced keeper and she includes some useful tips she's picked up from her own experiences. However I find the subject poorly researched and the information rather sketchy in places and lacking in consistency. It's rather like she has written it just from her own knowledge and experiences only. Some areas she dwells on in uneccessary detail for beginners needs while others which need a more detailed explaination are just skimmed over. There's also some uneccessary padding with brief chapters on showing and breeding which aren't of much interest to beginners and don't contain enough detail to enable anyone to get involved anyway. She has written a book on incubation so I suspect if you want to expand your hobby to breeding you can read that. The chapter on breeds is probably more comprehensive than beginners need and covers far more breeds than is really neccessary. If you are going to cover breeds their suitability for beginners should be at least be discussed but it reads a bit like a indiscriminating ragbag list of breeds she has come across with each breed being described in an inconsistent manner. It only gives a passing coverage to raising birds for the table and really is aimed at keeping layers. The index is just attrocius making it useless as a quick reference. Having said all this it does contain some sound advice for beginners from an experienced keeper though it falls well short of a decent reference book.

Good info but few colour pics	Customer Rating:
This book has a fair amount of good information but disapointingly it has mostly black and white pictures - which seems very old fashioned these days. It has a large section on purebreeds which I think could've been reduced in order to make way for more of the useful information on care and/or health.

Heritage breeds not mentioned

Customer Rating:

This book is okay and gives a good amount of information. However, it would have been good to mention that there are so-called heritage chicken in most countries. These chicken breeds are endangered and many countries have special programs of conserving them. It is, of course, nice to have dozens of fancy chicken breeds to choose from but it would be a good thing to remind people that own, national, culturally and historically important heritage breeds should always be the priority. Also, those are the chicken breeds that are most accustomed to local climate. For example, in Scandinavian area, there are many breeds that survive in harsh conditions and like to go out even in the snow. It is of course understandable that a small book cannot review all the breeds in the world. However, just a small note of the existence of heritage breeds would encourage people to search for more information on the topic. Other than that the book is okay and I really like the general tone of promoting self-sufficient lifestyle.

Great starter book	Customer Rating:
Very helpful book if you're thinking of keeping chooks in your back garden, all basic information you'll need, I found though that a lot of space was given over to the different breeds which could have been used for more details on looking after chickens, but would recommend it to anyone.

A great book & British too!	Customer Rating:
There are a lot of great books out there for beginners, but most of them are American, so the resources pages are not helpful to those of us starting out in the UK. This book is published by Broad Leys, who are a small independent British publishers specialising in books for smallholders, homesteaders, poultry keepers and organic gardeners. Exactly what I was looking for!