Review: Yum but um...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2012
UPDATE: The author read my recommendations and sent me a revision of this book addressing my suggestions below. The book is definitely vastly improved, much easier to work with, and downright enticing. Go for it.==============Okay, first what I like about this book. There is a good variety of different kinds of pizzas, and the photos will make you salivate for sure. I can't spend more than a few minutes with this book without really getting a Jones for pizza. The pizza ingredients themselves are pretty simple and well laid out, so even the recipe phobic (like me) should have no problem. The table of contents is active in both directions, going to the specific pizza recipe and back to the contents. But the book suffers from all the repetitive "dough" sections and the fact that going to a recipe lands you on the recipe itself, with the name of the recipe on the previous page.This book could be vastly improved by doing two things:(1) Code each pizza recipe to begin on a new page in the html (using the custom tag <mbp:pagebreak> right before each TOC-tagged recipe title) so when people click on a recipe in the contents, they are reassured that their click has taken them to the recipe they selected.(2) Get rid of the "For the DOUGH" sections for each pizza. As far as I can tell, it's just boilerplate copied over and over that interferes with the clear presentation of the recipes themselves.Some of the recipes actually call for store-bought pizza dough, so why include a section on making the dough from scratch? Do an introductory chapter that says, essentially, you have a choice of store-bought dough or dough made from scratch, and here's the basic way to make it from scratch. If there are slight differences in making the dough at the kneading stage (say, adding in some kind of special herb or oil), then include the deviation under the specific pizza recipe with an instruction "To the basic dough, add..." and include a link back to the basic dough how-to.It's a good book, and certainly worth its price. It could be a better book with these changes.