I have previously immensely enjoyed du Sautoy's books - especially Music of the Primes which is superlative - but wasn't so enamoured by this one.

This is partly because I tried reading it using iBooks on an iPhone, and the publishers hadn't included any of the illustrations - which rendered the whole experience rather trying. As well as the incessant mentions of the barcode thing, which was a bit pointless as I was *already* reading it on a smartphone! (ie, the publisher should have produced a proper iBook version with simple hyperlinks rather than this barcode business)

Plus I can't stand football or Coldplay so the frequent references to both as an attempt at popularising maths had the effect of unpopularising the book for me!

However, I fully concede that a younger readership (Guiness and ecstacy notwithstanding) reading it in 'dead tree' format will probably have a better experience reading the book than me, and will learn a lot of good stuff.

Oli