BuY It Now!!!

In a word this book is excellent. I am sure that all guitarists have, like I do,a few instructional guitar books. Just by chance I picked up this book and started going through the various pages and lessons. I have got to tell you that when I got the book home, popped in the first lesson CD I knew I had finally found a method book like no other. Interesting,clear, concise lessons as well as history of the guitar keeps me coming back and practicing. If you really want to learn how to play the guitar by reading a book and listening to a CD then purchase this book as soon as you can!!!!

Everything I wanted for learning guitar except theory

I love this book and 3-CD set, but everyone learns their own way. What worked for me in this approach was the following: Mr. Hamburger includes a great amount of discussion with each lesson, belaboring how to transition from, say, a particular D chord fingering to a G chord, spelling out which finger to move when and where. There are small but clear photographs showing the appropriate finger position for chords and strumming positions. He anticipates the kinds of problems that you are likely to have, and offers clear suggestions on how to overcome them. He structures the lessons in a way that they build logically on each other. When he illustrates the music on the CD, he plays exactly what is in the lesson -- no embellishments to show his stuff, just clear examples of what you should be playing. He plays each tune at the right speed, and then replays the tune at the slow speed that he expects the student to begin with. It is easy to play along with Mr. Hamburger as you learn. The full course introduces all the usual topics for acoustic guitar, including basic strumming, introductory finger picking and flat picking, pull-offs, hammer-ons, etc. The coverage is not in-depth enough to make you a master, but it is detailed enough to get you a first-year level of understanding by the time you complete the third book.
The music used throughout is traditional American music, "folk," if you will. If you are anxious to start your own garage rock band, this may not be the music of choice for you. If you do choose to learn guitar playing from this, you should supplement the text with some music theory....
I cannot think of anything in the lesson book that I thought was inappropriate. You aren't likely to find everything you would ever want to know about guitar in one place. But if you do, this book will be "volume one" of that library.

Nice intro to guitar, especially for folk music fans

I recommend this book for anyone who is picking up a guitar for the first time, but already has some basic knowledge of music notation. It gets you up to speed right away playing simple roots and folk songs, and emphasizes beginner drills, such as switching back and forth between two chords over and over until you can do it smoothly.

This book might also be nice for a beginner who has some guitar experience and is looking for a colletion of folk-style songs to learn and practice