Very informative

If you know squat about precious metal investing, this the book. Written in a clear and concise manner and with a very simple language. Great book!

A Shameful Edition for Dummies Franchise...

Author needs to cut the "I" comments that's just extra fluff to an already tiresome 300 pages.

Very little technical, cautions, and tips in each of the chapters to assist readers.

Bibliography? There is no bibliography in the back of the book to help readers continue on in studying precious metals investing. Oh, yeah, forgive the Type II spelling errors "witch" passes computer spell checks (where's the editor?!)-- that "witch" is just an example.

There's nothing in the book that's important about the physical ownership of precious metals such as: assay newly acquired precious metals, transporting it between countries.

Texts mentioned in the book's chapters are commonly used elsewhere by other authors. The writer should mention more advanced titles from his personal library on this subject of investing precious metals .

Links to websites as references is not professional. There has to be actual addresses to specific pages within a website where author pulled his information from.

Overall, the book is terribly vague in discussing precious metals investing-- it's more like a big, fat advertisement (plug!) for his other book on stocks. Skip this one. There is no way the author could have discussed precious metals investing in a single book-- there are too many forms of investing, which he mentions, that deserve books in their own right.

Superb Introduction

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R38BKPXFQI15QE Well, I'm a bit beyond this book now but it was a heckuva introduction and I'm sure you'll profit from reading it if you're a neophyte.

Very good and helpful information.

If you dont mind the title of this book. But as I think of it. This title does fit nicely. I am a dummy when it comes to Precious Metals. This book has a lot of very useful information. It also has a wealth of reference links. Very easy to understand. Does not make it tooo boring like some other books that I have read. This book also shows you past history on the performance of the Metals. Wish I knew about investing back in 2000. But don't we all. All I can say is I will be investing for the long term NOW. Great Book. I have picked up more books on this subject.

Simplistic, too many errors, bad advice and mixed data

It's easy to get mixed feelings about this book. It tries to cram everything together, history, categories of precious metals, reasons for booms & busts, strategies for investing, etc. It also tries to simplify and explain things in everyday language - it is a 'dummies' book after all. That's all commendable.

However, somewhere in the process the book became full of errors like "gold is good in times of inflation" or that gold has intrinsic value of so-and-so (it has cultural store of wealth value with mania phases, not intrinsic value beyond it's industrial use), etc.

This wouldn't be so bad if so much of the advice given, like inflation hedging, wasn't so bad, so clearly out of whack with actual historical data from the past 100 years and if the reasoning wasn't so full of gold-bug mythology, a lot of which has been proven wrong by real historians, investors, traders and financial analysts. If the book had more graphs, many of the errors in the argumentation would be visible to even a casual reader. No wonder there are so few graphs.

Gold and precious metals are not a bad investment per se. One just has to understand how they function in different kind of circumstances. This book is not a reliable source to find that out, unless you already know your stuff and find the few gold nuggets from the rest of the mud in the book.

Not recommended, unless one knows the basics and by then it's way too simplistic. Two stars, because it actually also has factually correct information that can be useful (on mining companies for example) and because it reminds people that it's not just a question of "buy & hold and it'll go through the roof forever".

As a better partial alternative, I'd recommend The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing by Katz and Holmes, although it's strictly gold only. Sane, well edited, reasonably argued and full of good advice on actual trading and investing in gold.