As a reasonable club chess player I found this book extremely useful and can heartily reccommend it to new starters looking for an easy to learn and popular opening. The sicilian defence is used by many top players and suits the player that likes to take the game to their opponent. The book is by no means the definitive work on any of the variations it explores - 'The Rauzer Attack', 'The Boleslavsky System', 'The Paulsen System' and the authors own system 'The Taimanov System', but it has plenty of helpful notes as well as providing examples from games between masters. As someone that finds learning masses of opening moves tedious I found the book very useful as it explains the key squares and pieces in the opening and more importantly tells you how to continue the game once you are 'out of the book', which many books of this type fail to do.