This is THE ebook one needs for planning a trip to Ireland. I can't say enough about this guide. Filled with wonderful photos and drawings and interesting text that really tells you about each area, this will be a wonderful resource prior to and during your travels. It gives you lots of options of sites to see in each area. Even if you are not planning a trip to Ireland in immediate future, the ebook is still very interesting and informative just to get an idea of all the treasures that await you on the Green Isle.

I purchased this book to use on an upcoming driving trip of Ireland and I find it to be uniformly poorly written and containing meager useable advice. It is organized like a traditional travel guide, but contains none of the features that make modern travel guides useful. Maps are the greatest deficiency. Not only are they of extremely poor quality when included(which the book itself excuses by blaming the ebook format), but there are so few maps that you could not rely on this book alone to get around. I didn't expect great maps--I have a GPS for that. I did expect there to be something, even back-of-napkin-type sketches to help me get some sense of where things are roughly located. The lack of graphics would be forgivable if the writing was excellent. Sadly, the writing is terrible. It reads like a ninth grade book report, attributable undoubtedly to the fact that it seems to steal wholesale from the wikitravel.org website. References in passing are routinely made to places, people, or things, with little or no explanation as to why the reference was made in the first place. In some cases, (the history section for example) the information is incoherent as it jumps from point to point with no explanation between. The book assumes you already know about whatever it is you're looking up. If that were the case, I'm not sure why you would be reading a guide. The generality of the information might have been at least useable if presented in an easily navigable format. Sadly, even here the book falls short. Some internal hyperlinks don't work, and others take you to sections that offer no additional information, but simply a link back to the original section. I can only hope that I don't get as lost in Ireland on my trip as I found myself while browsing through this book. On top of all that, in what seems like an attempt to placate the disgruntled buyer, the travel guide includes (as bonus?!) James Joyce's _The Dubliners_. I cannot fathom what must have been going through the publisher's minds while doing this. Maybe it is there to make me feel better once I have gotten hopelessly lost by using the guide's advice. Take heart, at least you're not in Joyce's Dublin! Seriously, do yourself a favor and go to your favorite bookseller and procure a copy of a real travel guide. Don't bother with this.