Review of Total Digital Photography by Chris George

If you are looking for a VERY, VERY basic intro to / overview of digital photography, and prefer something that is also a nice looking coffee-table book, Total Digital Photography by Chris George is a very good choice. This book is lavishly illustrated and some photos actually provide some useful information (exposure, etc.), unlike Hedgecoe's very pretty, but pretty much useless books.

The content is very, very basic: if you have no clue what a stop is,, or that larger aperture number means smaller opening and less light, and if you cannot visualize a difference between what a 24mm and 240mmm lenses would show, this book is a very good starting point. If you have even a very basic grasp of photography, however, this will be probably too rudimentary. I would very much recommend this as a good intro for a teenager (or a grown up) who got his/her first digital camera and would like to learn more about photography as a discipline.

This is NOT a how-to book, however: because it is so general and basic, it will give you ideas of how things work, but not necessarily HOW to take better pictures with your particular camera. If you are using a basic point and shoot digicam, you should not expect to produce pictures like the ones used for illustrative purposes here: there were most likely taken with top-of-the-line DSLRs, and further edited with photoshop. Still, if you want basic intro with some unrealistically pretty eye candy, this might be it. There are some good diagrams and infographics annd these are very competently produced (although some look vaguely, and somewhat uncomfortably familiar: the lens viewpoint diagram for example, is uncomfortably similar to the one in Lee Frost's excellent Q and A Guide that appears on the p. 17 of Frost's book)

I think the author / editors are somewhat misleading when they say it is also a good book for intermediate photographers. It is not: there are very few things that would be useful for the more competent amateur. Sure, there are a few pages that might be useful (e.g., night-time shooting table with recommended exposure info), but they usually have been covered in more detail in more advanced books. If you want something a little bit more practical, I would highly recommend The Q&A Guide To Photo Techniques instead - less flashy, but more useful.