Unlike the two other reviewers, I felt that the book is fairly disappointing. The book consists of 4 parts: Camera Basics, The Digital Image, Taking Pictures and The Digital Darkroom. The "Camera Basics" part discusses the different camera types that are on the market and will be not very useful to most starters in photography because it is very likely that you already own a camera and what you want to learn is how to make the most of it. And there are much better books explaining how you can make the most of what you own.
The second part ("The Digital Image") is all about file types and equipment to edit and print files and again focuses on additional purchases that you could make without talking about what would be most helpful to new photographers: how to improve the photo's in the first place. Although there is nothing wrong with what's discussed in this part, it's also not very inspiring.
The third part discusses some of the technical aspects of photography but not in a lot of detail and only towards the end (composition + a few chapters on how to take photos under specific circumstances, e.g. flash, portraits, action, low-light, landscapes, close-ups, etc.) do you get some useful ideas on how to improve your photography.
The final part (Digital Darkroom) is the most disappointing section. It's okay for people who have never edited an image in their life before, but there are much better books available on photo editing and this book fails spectacularly in that it doesn't explain how most of the edited images are obtained. It really is like buying a cooking book with great photos of nice things to prepare with neither a list of ingredients nor a set of instructions.
I'd look in other books for beginners which explain what you can do with the camera you own and a book dedicated to photo editing instead.