[.uk] The Yoga Handbook: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide (ISBN 0760747342)

Great first yoga book:
This is an Americanization of a South African Yoga book. The focus of this book is on application. Information is provided in a way to immediately useful. While there is some information on meditation, chakras... the focus is poses. The basic structure of the sections covering poses is very similar to the coverage in a yoga journal article on an advanced pose. Each pose gets about 3-6 intermediate forms which progressively move you into the pose with a photograph and 1 paragraph of textual description. This is followed by a large photo of the final position. In addition almost every pose has variants on both less and more difficult forms. The net result is that most poses in the beginning corpus are covered well yet the book is not overly long nor is the coverage skimpy. Further what is very nice is that Noa rates the poses in difficulty from 1-4 (including the variants). I can strongly recommend as a first yoga book, or someone looking to fill holes in their knowledge of basic poses.