taiji's books
Hello. I play as taiji 1 dan on the Kiseido Go Server. I'm writing a series of Go books. These books are growing out of a series of children's classes and are loosely designed as textbooks in that regard. However, you can also use them for self-study.
The 30k-20k Study Book
The first book is almost done, and should serve you well throughout your first three to six months of play.
The book is available for download in eBook form (PDF) on the KGS Beginner's room homepage at: http://holosys.co.uk/beginnersroom/ temporarily unavailable
Click on "Game Files" and my book is listed as the "30k-20k Study Book". See below for mirrors.
About the book:
- The latest version is 0.5.2 available as taiji4z.pdf or taiji4z.zip. Previous versions did not have embedded fonts.
- If you notice that the book could be better, let me know how, and I will try to make it better.
- The first book (30k-20k) will always be free in eBook form, to promote the spread of Go and teach Go.
List of Mirrors:
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http://eckserver.eckerd.edu/~bordelsr/taiji/ old version
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http://www2.hku.nl/~dagomar/taiji/ old version
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http://people.cc.jyu.fi/~juhtolv/go/docs/ current version
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http://math.sun.ac.za/~go current version
About these mirrors:
- If a link is broken, leave a message here please so I can remove the link or find another host.
- If anyone else wants to host the book, add your link /under/ the list of links above. Therefore the list is self-sorting oldest links first.
Errata:
- Section 6.1, p59, white's 24 is captured, should be removed from the next figures (Figure 7, Figure 8, Diagram 1)
- Chapter 8, p68, black 3 and 5 should be swapped for the basic joseki sequence, the text in the paragraph agrees, it's just a diagram "typo"
- Chapter 9, p72, Problems 2 and 4 are identical...?
- Chapter 10, p78, second paragraph, "Black must now prevent white 'b'" not "...prevent white 'a'".
- Chapter 11, p90, "This would mean white has more than 30 points in the upper left" not "...in the upper right"
- Chapter 11, p96, 109 is still numbered "9", but this diagram should only be numbered from 11 to 28.
EwoutStam: The book is not at a very "printable" size (A4/letter size). The book also has quite a few pages (100+).
I figured out how to make my printer driver squeeze four pages on one sheet of paper. Since the pages were intended to be small, the letters are not too small to read, and the resulting pile of paper isn't too big. I advise anyone who wants to print this out to try messing with their printer driver's properties to save on paper.
pwaldron: The discussion of the AGA komi in the rules section of the book is incorrect, although not terribly. Komi must be an odd number (5.5 or 7.5) to keep the scores derived from area and territory counting methods the same. The 6.5 point komi used in Japan can cause problems under the AGA rules.
GoJaC(21k): During casual reading, I noticed a few "errors" (what I believe to be errors, of the "typo" kind) on the pdf I downloaded from math.sun.ac.za on 15 April.
I've gone ahead and made an errata section above, after no comments from other people for six weeks.