This book promises a great deal but delivers very little.

It is a skimpy volume with little content for your money. There are very few pieces, few practical exercises and a great deal of textual padding. If you have any knowledge of the piano you will zip through the first half of the book pretty quickly. However, the treatment is superficial and will leave beginners unprepared for the sudden acceleration in difficulty in the final chapters.

You might learn five or six simple tunes from this book, ranging from 'Silent Night' to 'Autumn Leaves', and you might learn something about chord theory, but you are unlikely to be able to DO much with these. Most seriously, the book almost totally neglects the study of rhythm, so even if you do learn to combine right hand melodies with left hand chord accompaniments, these are unlikely to sound very good.

Overall I find the book is very poor, failing to cater to beginners or intermediate players. There are much better alternatives on the market.

This book has transformed the way I play piano and approach my learning. It combines rhythm, harmony and improvisation in a series of progressively structured exercises. Each piece or study comes with a list of checkpoints designed to help you understand what is happening in the music, and a series of assignments designed to guide you into playing the pieces while also internalizing the theory in a practical way.

So for example, I've read about the 'cycle of fifths' in lots of other books, but this is the first book that gives you a set of exercises to carry out that make you actually learn the cycle. And while you are learning the cycle, you are also improvising over the chords in related scales and practising different rhythm patterns. That might sound complicated, but the exercises are cleverly designed to build your skills in a step-by-step progression.

As others have said, if you put the work in, this book will allow you to achieve the results. And you will have a lot of fun at the same time.

I would recommend that you are around grade 3 to start working with this book.

Oh, and the book is absolutely packed with material. I am practising about an hour a day now and reckon it will take me a year to get through it all and am ready for volume 2

I'm delighted with this keyboard, I think it is a great entry-level piece of equipment. Maybe in a year or two I'll be ready for something bigger and better, but this is just great for now. If like me you're an adult looking to take up piano again, this is a good place to start - it sounds great, it feels sturdy enough and it's packed with features

Sound quality - the default grand piano sound is excellent, there are lots of other good sounds I like (esp. the funky ep), but I tend to stick to this most of the time

Touch sensitive keys - this is essential (don't consider a keyboard without this feature). The key action is fairly light compared to a real piano - you may find you are not hitting the keys hard enough if you switch instruments.

Adaptor - contrary to what one reviewer wrote, the keyboard does come with a power adaptor

Note that the keyboard has 61 keys, which makes it smaller than a standard piano. In practice I've found I'm able to play almost all pieces, with just a few really low notes unobtainable. This also means that the keyboard is fairly compact - helps if you don't have much space!

Song book - my only disappointment is that the keyboard doesn't come with a song book, without which the 'learning system' is practically useless. But if you register the product with yamaha online, you can get a pdf version and print that(I had to write to customer services to make this happen). With the song book, the learning system is great.

Other great features - I use the built-in metronome a lot, I also like the ability to record each hand separately - so you can lay down the left hand and then practise the right, for example.