There's no doubt that the styles in the books are fabulous, really beautiful and elegant. It's a good source of ideas. But, in terms of D.I.Y hair styling, the step by step guides are quite vauge. Some styles start with instructions such as 'blow dry into curls', which is actually very difficult to do with most hair types, and no instruction is given in the introduction on how to achieve this. A basic explanation of commonly used techniques wouldn't have gone amiss. For example, saying 'disguise hairband with hair from ponytail' doesn't tell me how to do that, and the pictures don't help.
I was also hoping for a range of styles which dealt with different hair lengths (most off the models in the book have exceptionally long hair), which makes eighty percent of the styles irrelevant to girls with medium or short hair.