It is always dangerous to criticize a travel guide to a place you have always lived, but reading this guide once again confronted me with the prevailing prejudice that Holland (the Netherlands) equals Amsterdam. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: it doesn't.
Personally, I don't care for Amsterdam that much: much of it is a noisy, messy, tourist trap filled with people you would prefer to avoid. Outside the capital life is generally much more gentle. However, there is enough hustle and bustle to be found in the nightlife of Rotterdam, Utrecht, or Groningen.
The problem is that you are unlikely to experience those places after having read this guide. Often it reads like an extension of the RG to Amsterdam, showing an unwillingness on the part of the researches to take the long one-hour train journey to Utrecht or Rotterdam and take in those places. Although I generally prefer this series over Lonely Planet, my advice is to take the 'other' guide to the Netherlands if you're really interested in travelling outside Amsterdam

I discovered The Rough Guide series last year when I was dazzled by their guide to Thailand. By comparing the Holland version to that one, however, I'd say TRG has dropped the ball in The Netherlands. Whereas TRG Thailand approaches its subject at a subdued level of wonder, the Holland writers seem to have gone about their itinerary by suppressing their interest in anything outside of Amsterdam or art museums. Forget subdued, it's as if the authors burned out in the capital, and a mummified expedition dragged their feet through the polders out of a need to comply with the terms of their contract. Humbug quotes from famous writers set the tone for chapters on cities they dislike. Many of the towns they cover are evaluated with Amsterdam as their benchmark: Utrecht - "just a half-hour from Amsterdam, all the brashness and vitality of the capital is absent;" The Hague - "[the city's] older buildings are a rather modest collection with little of Amsterdam's flamboyance." A measly six pages are devoted to Rotterdam, none of which mention the city's uppermost nightlife (for the sake of comparison, Michelin's guide gives Rotterdam twenty). Furthermore, parks and recreation get little or no air time. Nothing is mentioned in the way of The Hague's many forests and dune parks. If you obeyed only this guide, you wouldn't know that sky diving, among other sports, is offered in the Frisian Islands.

I do enjoy the voice of the Rough Guides, that of a discerning traveller, and the gray informational sections detailing national custom are usually right on target. As expected, each of these signature features can be found here. But if you want a comprehensive guide to The Netherlands, for recreation & nightlife as well as Amsterdam & museums, you might look elsewhere. I'd start with Michelin.

This is the closest thing out there to my ideal guide. The authors really did their research, and it showed in the copious amounts of background info for each city and region. Listings for lodging, restaurants and attractions were scrupulously accurate. The Rough Guide does not have as much of a budget focus as Let's Go; it does list inexpensive places to stay, but has a little bit of a tendency to sneer at them. The only drawback for me was that the authors' taste is more boyish and more upscale than mine. They like military and shipping museums and dungeons a lot, and are a little too harsh on places they find kitschy or dull. Nevertheless, I'm glad I brought this guide along. It made my trip much more enjoyable and did a lot for my peace of mind.

Although not advertised as such, this is a Bruno Gmunder/Spartacus City Guide, which is dedicated solely to male homosexual pornography, including graphic pictures. As a married 38-year-old mother of a five-year-old child, I wasn't very interested in the subject matter.

Gay people don't complain when they read straight books, nor do straight people label there books like: "The Straight Guide to Amsterdam" The book was fine. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Im glad I did research on the book first before I bought it :)

Serious mistake in not having an index.
Content of book good.
Col. Pergrin an excellent commander during those difficult times.

As the title states, this book is about the exploits of combat engineers in the Ardennes and, in part, in the Heurten Forest during the period November to January, 1944. It is somewhat unique in that it focuses on the contributions that engineers made toward stopping two Nazi panzer divisions and one army division during the December attack in the Belgium-Luxembourg area. It is a story that needs to be told and Col. Pergrin does a good job of doing it. He had his headquarters in Malmedy, and he was in a very good position to critique the exploits along the northern shoulder. (At one point, the Colonel identifies not only a northern and southern shoulder, but an eastern and western one as well!) However, the importance of this book is marred by a distinct lack of editing and proof reading. Spelling errors are myriad. For example, the same place name is spelled in different ways. Photographs are repeated for no particular reason with different captions. Some sentences make no sense. H.M. Cole's maps from the US Army in WWII, "Ardennes" book are reprinted, so small that the information is unusable, and no citation is given for the source. (Lack of citations for sources is another shortcoming of the book) On the other hand, there are a few unit action maps that are very useful in interpreting the actions of engineers at Trois Ponts, Stavelot, and Malmedy. Col. Pergrin has made a valuable contribution in this work. If he had had a good editor to smooth out the repetitious repeats of general Battle of the Bulge history, bring the chapters together as a cohesive unit and eliminate extraneous side trips, we would have a 5-star book.

My husband and I recently took a trip to Brussels, for the first time. We "thought" this book would be a great guide for us in a foreign country... but instead found ourselves getting lost. The map is huge, you'll need to find a coffee shop to actually sit and open the darn thing, and the sites aren't addressed clearly. A bit of advice, there are huge maps on the corners of most major streets that tell where you are and how to get to a site; use the undergrounds, much cheaper and easier to get around; and ask your hotel conceirge for directions, they know everything...oh, and make sure you brush up on your French, some village sandwich shops aren't as nice as your regular star bucks :)

I bought this guide for a day trip into Brussels, during a recent European vacation. I found the guide to be extremely helpful in planning my one day visit. It focuses on the "Top Sites" to be visited in each city, and has plenty of interesting historical information, as well as practical information on hours of operation, and local transport. The shopping recommendations offered by the guide are also excellent. The only disappointing item about this guide was the one map, which is on very thin paper, and which was quite unwieldy. A better choice would be smaller maps scattered throughout the book. While I recommend this book for a day trip, it would not be suitable for a longer stay. I look forward to using this guide again when I visit Bruges in the future.

My husband and I traveled to Brussels with this book, and got so lost. We met another couple with the same book--and they could not find anything either! We had better luck with our hotel map. I love lonely planet books, but stay clear of this one.

I found the LP Brussels to be informative, clear and altogether correct. I used this to live in Brussels for 3 months while working, and it never failed me, just as their guides never do. I highly recommend.

Although this guide had descriptions and some history of interesting places to visit, it had virtually no info on how to get there. I was looking for something like: "Catch a tram number... from Centraal Station to get to...", which wasn't there. I was hoping to find directions on how to get to all these wonderful places covered in the guide, but that simply wasn't available. It would have also been helpful to know the prices of admission tickets to museums etc, which I also did not find in the book.

A decent guide book, now a bit dated. Not as interesting as the D-K Eyewitness series, but the site descriptions are useful. The city maps are weak, showing only a few street names. May be better if you already know the Netherlands, but not enough for the first-time visitor.

My husband and I used this book on our week's vacation in Belgium. We were going to be staying at a small Bed & Breakfast in West Flanders, taking day trips to some of the larger cities in the country, so we chose the Baedeker's guide for its separate driving map.

The driving map served us well on the highways between cities. However, once we got off the major roads and tried to find the smaller attractions shown as dots and crosses on the map, we began to realize that the smaller roads necessary to get from the highways to the attractions were frequently unlabeled. This caused some major confusion as we also hit a road detour and ended up driving along a one-lane road that seemed to go right through the field of a private farm.

The maps of the cities listed in the guidebook itself were also found to be lacking, unless one had already figured out how to get to central Brussels, and only wanted to visit the museums around the Place des Palais. For more details, Baedeker's recommends purchasing their guides to the specific cities that you wish to visit.

The guide primarily came in handy for narrowing down which cities we wanted to visit, and for its listing of the major attractions for each city (even though the attractions aren't always marked on the maps).

Other handy features of the guide include a language section that lists common words one may need to know, with both the French and Dutch/Flemish translation. The translations are extremely useful for those who would actually like to know what food they are ordering before the waiter or waitress sets it in front of them (esp. if you do not like eel).

There are sections on Belgian art history, castles and monasteries, markets (flea, antique, and flower), and military cemeteries (of which Belgium has quite a lot). All of these make Baedeker's Belgium very useful as a first and general guide to the country. However, I recommend getting guides for specific cities you plan to visit, or finding a guide to Belgium with more thorough city maps. For, while it is a small country, it appears Belgium is too large for Baedeker's to tackle in just one guidebook.

This is a precise, detailed map of the central portion of Brussels. Many of Brussels' suburbs are not included. If you think you will have need of any villages on the outskirts, e.g., Waterloo, you will need a different map.

The Florence City Pack did a great job of giving the top 25 sites to visit in Florence. The picutres were good as were the highlights of each cite. We also found the general city information to be helpful, for example, public restrooms and getting around.

Unfortunately, we found the hours of operation for each site were extremely unreliable, causing us to miss museums and try to build them into our schedule the next day. It seemed that this was the norm for most of the sites they listed. We ended up calling the places to get the visiting hours.

Overall, the book was helpful and easy to carry around because it fits into a pocket. The map was up to date and came in handy. I would reccommend the book as quick reference, but suggest getting a more comprehensive guide for detailed descriptions of the region and sites.