Mastering the Basics vs Elementary Go Series

Velobici: the following is a strawman. please add your opinions and lets see is some consensus forms.

Mastering the Basics seems to have a rather wide range of difficulties.

• Five Hundred and One Opening Problems can be read at the 12k level. I one learn three concepts, many of the problems can either be answered correctly. If not correctly, then at least the correct direction of play is clear. Once one reads the hints located immediately below each problem, the book is easier yet.
• One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems ranges from one move to 5+ move problems. The one move problems are accessible to all. The most complicated problems may be a challenge at the SDK level.
• Making Good Shape is accessible to all SDKs and more uniform in difficulty than the books listed above.
• Five Hundred and One Tesuji Problems is strong SDK verging into dan level
• The Basics of Go Strategy...no opinion at this time.
• All About Ko...no opinion at this time.

Compared to the Elementary Go Series, Mastering the Basics may be easier or at least more accessible. The Elementary Go Series books, Tesuji and Life and Death, in particular, are more like textbooks than the Mastering the Basics series. The generous amount of practice offered by Mastering the Basics, combined with problems that are very similar yet require a different answer due to a stone or two being moved, provide the student with abundant, high quality study material.

Would recommend studying Five Hundred and One Opening Problems, One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems, and Making Good Shape before Tesuji and Life and Death. Then Five Hundred and One Tesuji Problems followed by Attack and Defense. In the Beginning, 38 Basic Joseki , and The Endgame might be read at any time in this sequence.

xela: I disagree with some of this. In particular, I think that Making Good Shape is a challenging (but useful!) book, and some reading ability is required in order to get the most out of it; therefore I'd recommend that people study Life and Death and Tesuji first. (Possibly the content of this page, if it turns out to be useful, should be merged with Recommended Intermediate Books.)

Velobici: There is no intent to copy the content of the thread from GoDiscussions. As author of the particular comments above, I submitted them both here and at GoDiscussions. Rather, this is a common question, one that can be expanded to include the Get Strong at Go Series....which of the three should I do first? If we get useful content here, we could either merge with Recommended Intermediate Books or leave independent...could be the start of a series of pages comparing different series of books.