This is an astonishingly facile book, even for the self-help genre. If you've read any other "how to be happy" type book, you've read it all before, and better done than this: pages and pages of "you'll be happy if you want to be happy" and "salad cheers you up more than chips".

Either pull yourself together and stop thinking that self-help books can make you happy, or get yourself a therapist and work out what the real problem is. But don't buy this nonsense.

The publisher's blurb says "With its A-Z format, finding those references and unusual explanations has never been easier."

I disagree.

The ABC format actually makes it very difficult to find the great information in the book, because it assumes you know exactly what you're looking for. If you do, you probably don't need this book. If you don't, you'll be left flicking backwards and forwards between pages, with dozens of unrelated articles sitting in between the ones you're interested in.

The information in this book is fine: nothing earth-shattering but perhaps a useful one for an aspiring writer's bookshelf. But its organisation leaves an awful lot to be desired.

I wish I'd had this book 6 years ago when I quit my job and went to work for myself. Like thousands of other people, I'd had enough, I wanted out - but I knew another company wasn't the answer. I had a plan of how I wanted to work for myself, I had the knowledge... but I couldn't quite see the escape route. If you want to see the escape route, this book has it.

If you're just sitting at your desk hating your job, this isn't the book for you. It assumes you know how you want to make money, and that you do still want to make money, just that you'll do it for yourself rather than your pointy-haired boss. But if you're sitting there with an idea that you know will make you enough money to live on *eventually*, then this book will help you transition from monthly pay cheque to the thrill and terror of making your own living in your own business.

If you're looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, an easy exit or someone to pat you on the head and tell you if you build it, they will come, it's not the book for you. But if you want solid advice on how to convince your friends, family, bank manager and yourself that you're doing what you know is the right thing, this book will really help.

I've been an eBay seller for more than a decade now, and I've watched the site move from happy community where people cheerfully set envelopes of cash around the world, to a marketplace that continually operates under a cloud of suspicion. Kenneth Walton and his ilk are in no small measure responsible for this. If you've ever wondered whether what a seller has listed is *really* what they're selling, if you've ever been quizzed about *just exactly* what your own listing means, you may have him to thank.

Those of us who've been around eBay for a while probably remember the story: the bust of a "huge shilling ring" in eBay's art categories, people who bumped worthless paintings up to hundreds of dollars, and almost-worthless paintings up to thousands of dollars. This is the story told by one of the men who did it.

In an irony that isn't lost on him, Ken Walton was a bored lawyer when he discovered eBay. It wasn't long before he'd quit his job to work full time at his new careers as art dealer, buying thrift store paintings and reselling them on eBay. You might not think that would be such a lucrative move, but Walton had a few things on his side. Firstly, this was the early days of eBay. Auctions were exciting - people bid for the thrill and for the win, and they bid stupid amounts of money for - frankly - rubbish. But Walton packed the odds in his favour: he and a friend began bidding on each other's auctions. This was initially permitted by eBay as a way of establishing a reserve price. When eBay banned shilling, he developed a list of new IDs, to bump up his sale prices and those of his colleagues.

It didn't stop there. Walton developed what he called the "naive seller technique", listing paintings that could have been (but probably weren't) by known artists in such a way that art collectors would think they'd spotted something the seller hadn't. That way, he gained collectors' interest without ever directly misleading them. It's one way to salve your conscience.

The genius of Walton's book is that I end up wanting him to get away with it. I've heard any number of sellers make the same unconvincing excuses he makes, and say the same mea culpas when caught. I don't buy it: if you set out to delude people, even indirectly, you're a crook. But Walton is such an entertaining crook, I find myself forgiving him. Mea culpa indeed.

The Guide has been around for a few years now - I was made aware of it when they first reviewed my blog in the 2008 edition. It's an odd sort of publication: it looks like a magazine, both in size and in layout, but definitely has a bookish price tag.

The Guide bills itself as "The Essential Guide to Buying and Selling | How to make SERIOUS money on eBay" (that latter seems a bit close to the title of Dan Wilson's book, doesn't it?). I don't know what's happened to it over the last 12 months, but where before it felt patchy, unfinished, almost as though it were written by someone who'd never used eBay but knew how to write a how-to book, this year it's turned into something a lot more useful.

Mostly this is a guide for sellers, aimed probably at those who've sold a couple of personal items but want to sell more, or who are considering going pro. The two longest chapters are "Introductory Selling" and "Advanced Selling", which cover all the basics, with extensive sections on what can go wrong and how to deal with it, and auction management for people who look at their ever-filling inbox and freak out. There are numerous case studies on sellers who are "already doing it" - from running an eBay business alongside your B&M shop, to (intriguingly) a seller who's quitting online retail and advises others to do the same.

There's more. There's the inevitable "how to buy on eBay" chapter, which in a "how to sell" book is almost entirely pointless: I'll forgive this one because it jumps on my own favourite bandwagon, asking why eBay has no proper shopping cart. There's a chapter on PayPal and alternative payment methods, and another on eBay competitors which runs through the basics of selling on Amazon and PlayTrade. There's a useful "Reviews Directory" of eBay-related software which even experienced sellers might find worth a look.

The magazine format has one huge thing to recommend it: colour pictures. And there are a lot, mainly in the form of screenshots which walk you through how to set up an eBay shop or take a decent photograph, or even how to list on Amazon marketplace.

If you're a seller newish to eBay, this is worth getting: it pretty much covers the basics, it's reasonably entertaining and the format is easy to dip in and out of, especially as it's peppered with "memorable auction" boxes highlighting some of the more unusual listings in eBay's history, and website reviews, suggesting places you can get further help and information. If you're a seller who's already running a full-time business and knows what they're doing, on the other hand, there's very little here you don't already know - and anything you need to check, you'd be better doing online where the information is bang up to date.

Mr Farkas, it must be said, has far too much time on his hands. This collection of questions sent to unsuspecting eBay sellers is excruciating at times, as poor people just trying to turn a buck try to make sense of the bizarre pre-sales questions he throws at them. If Candid Camera, slapstick or people being made uncomfortable amuses you, then this is your kind of humour. Personally, I found some of the responses from sellers just embarrassing. But what made this book really worthwhile was the sellers who 'got it', the ones who knew they were being wound up, and gave absolutely as good as they got.

This is a great gift for the eBay seller in your life, who will undoubtedly see something familiar here. But please, as a seller myself, I beg you to keep this out of the hands of eBay buyers. They don't need to be given more ideas.

I've heard it estimated that there are more than 50 bits of legislation affecting residential lettings. For new landlords, it can be an absolute quagmire to navigate - and even for experienced landlords, it's hardly easy. Tessa Shepperson is an experienced and knowledgeable solicitor specialising in residential property matters, and she is the perfect person to guide us through the chaos.

The book covers all the areas that a landlord will need to consider, beginning with an overview of the legal framework and all the different regulations that need to be obeyed. There are further chapters on finding a tenant, preparing the paperwork, tenancy deposits, matters which might arise during the life of the tenancy, and the end of the tenancy. A chapter on problem tenants is particularly useful. Everything is written with admirable clarity, and is immensely readable. If you only buy one book as a landlord, make it this one.

What's particularly impressive about this book is that it's updated so frequently. My 2008 edition covers, for example, tenancy deposit schemes and Local Housing Allowance, both fairly recent changes. This diligence from both author and publisher is commendable, and I hope that this will continue for many more editions to come.

I've read a lot of other reviews that praise this to the skies, and I'm almost wondering if those reviewers read the same book I did. This was deeply mediocre, awkward, obtuse. Nothing particularly happened, there wasn't really a plot, there were no particular revelations of any significance. As another reviewr has said, "severely underwhelming".

When a book has a title like WordPress Theme Design, you expect its remit to be pretty specific: it should be about WordPress themes. Somewhere in this book there are a few useful tips on WordPress design, but largely, they're hidden under a lot of waffle and off-topic material which is better-covered elsewhere: much of it is, unfortunately, just another design book, and not a great one at that.

Chapter one, for example, begins with what you'll need. A browser, you say? I would never have guessed. Chapter two covers the author's personal design process, with particular reference to drawing a sketch of how you want the site to look first. If you've ever designed a website, you won't need this.

By chapter three, thank goodness, we finally get to a bit of WordPress: "coding it up". This is a walkthrough of creating a theme, and could be helpful to someone who'd never done it before and who was incapable of taking a look at Kubrick or WordPress Classic and seeing how they work. Together with chapter six's WP theme tags reference, we have the beginnings of something useful, but it's surrounded by an entire chapter on how to check your site in more than one browser, which is hardly specific to WordPress, and another two largely concerned with the author's dislike of dropdown menus and AJAX for forms.

I'm failing to see, really, who this book is aimed at. It clearly assumes basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP and javascript, so it's not for total beginners. And yet vast chunks of it are far too basic to be aimed at experienced designers wanting to learn about techniques specific to WordPress. Crucial WP features like hooks and filters are omitted altogether. There is not one mention anywhere of even wp_head or wp_footer, so anyone producing themes according to this book is going to find lots of plugins will not work with them. And the exhortation to "read the Codex" for more advanced use of theme tags seems to undermine the whole purpose of the book.

At just 211 pages, this is a thin book. Add to that Ms Silver's waffley style, a fair amount of white space and several chapters that have almost nothing to do with WordPress, and the cover price seems excessive. I'd cheerfully pay for a book that helped me to write better WordPress themes, but I'm sorry to say that this is not that book.

This is (to the best of my knowledge) the only account of the "infamous" Nine O'Clock Service that's longer than a newspaper article, and that makes it reasonably important, at least for those of us who were involved with NOS. It's a shame, then, that the author has chosen to concentrate almost exclusively on Chris Brain, and not consider any of the wider picture of what went wrong, and what went right.

The story of Chris's journey to the Anglican priesthood and his subsequent fall from grace is obviously a tremendously important part of the history of NOS, but it's not the entire story implied by the book's title. There's little consideration of the wider context of NOS, for example, of its place within St. Tom's culture, and within the Sheffield club scene too.

I hate to criticise a book for not being the one I wanted to read, or the one I would have written, but the title of Roland Howard's work is very misleading. This is a pretty damning character study of Chris Brain, but it fails on just about every other level.