This book starts out nicely, and it covers all the openings, and Seirawan has an easy style to read. BUT:
- he starts off by telling you how to open badly, recounting his early learning experiences. This makes for a good story, but since first impressions last, what I remember most clearly from this book are all the bad openings!
- the pages are badly laid out and printed. Sam Collins's Understanding The Chess Openings shows how it should be done, with a new page for every opening, three sharp board illustrations per page and lots of space and clearly set moves. By contrast Winning Chess Openings does not have enough illustrations, and the ones there are are quite badly printed, fuzzy with extra lines on the squares. The openings just run into each other over the pages as though trying to save space. It makes it really hard to flick back and forth through the book, which you need to do in order to work out how each opening relates to the other, since ...
- ... the different openings are relentless. I didn't feel there was enough of an overview to know what to do with each opening. You turn the page and bam, there's another opening to swallow, and the book goes on like that page after page. He needs much more logical grouping, so that the reader knows how the openings relate to each other. The bulk of the book is the central 166 pages, split into sections by king vs queen's pawn and classical vs modern. Those categories are far too broad, and were meaningless when I was beginning. It would be much better to split the openings under the central variation - Sicilian, Italian, French etc. - as then each section would be much smaller, and it would be clearer how the openings are grouped and differentiated.
- he tells you that he has missed out some hypermodern openings, and that he has saved these until last on purpose as he thinks they are the best when learning chess. Brilliant. You have to read 200 pages of the book before he tells you the best openings. If these are the best openings, why doesn't he just put them first? The book seems to be written backwards. He should lay out the material the way he does his tactics book, in which he starts with the main tactics likes forks and pins and ends the books with less common things like windmills which makes sense as, let's be honest, how often do you read right to the end of a book?
With editing, re-setting and better printing this could be a great book. I like his easy beginner's style and friendly way of writing. But as a beginner I stopped reading this book and it was only when I came back to it months later, having learned elsewhere (Wikipedia's entries on chess openings are brilliant, as is Sam Collins' book) lots of opening theory, that I could see what he was trying to say.