Pro's: Very in depth and covers a lot of different situations. Is very thorough in the steps to developing a great retriever. I did like the concepts used on training a dog through the various steps associated with different levels of schooling: elementary, junior high, and high school.
Con's: About 1/2 to 2/3 of the instructions in this book are completely impractical for most of the people out there that own guns dogs and live in the suburbs. This is a great book for someone that lives on a farm or has access to large fields where you can take a dog to train. Much of the books is geared around using live birds, in the a field, and with blanks in a gun. I don't know of too many neighborhoods where you can keep live birds. This is a requirement for the advanced levels within the book. Again, if you live in rural American, then yes, but not in "the burbs". Also finding a field where you can do all the advanced setup and training as mentioned in the book is impractical and downright impossible for the average weekend warrior. I can tell you living in Colorado, that most of the state lands do not allow you to train dogs year round; only during a short time frame right before hunting season. It's impossible to do 9 months of dog training in a 2 month time frame. Maybe other parts of the U.S. are different, or this book it geared towards a different era, before everything became so restricted. However, if you have access to land and have a place to keep live birds, then by all means this book will work for you. Otherwise, only expect to be able to accomplish about 1/2 of the lessons mentioned within that are practical for your backyard work.
