Personally, I think this is a great book for someone first learning how to tie flies and the one I always recommend. When I first started, over 30 years ago, this is the book that finally made it happen for me after a couple of false starts with other books. One of its strong points is that it uses illustrations rather than photographs to demonstrate tying techniques. This may not be obvious to some, but illustrations do a far better job at demonstrating the tying process that photos do. Trust me.