Secrets of Practical Chess (New Enlarged Edition) [Kindle Edition]

Only a dozen pages are devoted to the opening and they are mostly aimed at evaluating chess books on unusual openings. This section can be skipped entirely without much loss.

The middlegame has all of 20 pages dedicated to it, but they do manage to offer some "practical" advice once again. Most of it comes in "blurbs" - little nuggets of advice based on what has worked for a very successful GM.

The rest of the book is devoted to the endgame and although it recounts some well-known ending basics such as opposition, triangulation, and R+P vs R ending, it also contains some very good information that is not nearly so well known. Such includes: Black's ideal defensive pawn formation in a 4v3 pawn ending with all pawns on the same side; why the c pawn offers the best winning chances in a Q+P vs Q ending; and some handy rules for R vs N and R vs B pawnless endings.

On the whole, the book is quite "practical" and probably worth the price to a fair number of club players of lesser strength.

I particularly liked the section on the endgame. I am not about to sit through a 200 page endgame manual and memorize things like "this ending is a win with K on e7 and R at a2 but a draw if the K is on d6; however, if the passed pawn is a RP, then the White K must be on the 3 squares in front of the RP, etc." Nunn gives good basic rules and examples in the endgame which, if you learn, should cover 90 percent of your endgames.