I referred to a great deal of books, magazines, electronic data and websites while working on this book. The following were the most significant sources:
Electronic: ChessBase Magazine
Online and Internet: CompuServe Chess Forum, The Week in Chess
Magazines: Inside Chess, British Chess Magazine, New in Chess Magazine, Bulletin of the Central Chess Club of the USSR, Shakhmatny v SSSR
Periodicals: Informator, New in Chess Yearbook
Books:
Play Winning Chess (Seirawan and Silman), Microsoft Press, 1990
The Oxford Companion to Chess, Second Edition (Hooper and Whyld), Oxford University Press, 1992
Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, vols. A–E, (Ed. Matanović), Šahovski Informator, various years
Chess Personalia: A Biobibliography (Gaige), McFarland, 1987
Steve Davis Plays Chess (Davis and Norwood), Batsford, 1995
How to Use Computers to Improve Your Chess (Kongsted), Gambit, 2003
An immense number of books have been published on chess, covering every aspect of the game. Some are good; some are bad. How is one to choose which to buy? If you find a reviewer whose opinions you value, then that is a starting point, but note that a lot of chess-book reviews are somewhat shallow and non-critical.
A good way to choose chess books is by author. Once you have found some authors whose work you enjoy and have found useful, then chances are that their other works will appeal, if they are on subjects of interest to you. Likewise, you might also look out for other books by the same publishers, as the degree of quality control they exert is likely to be maintained across their list. Two of the authors who inspired me to become a chess writer were John Watson and John Nunn, and it has been my privilege to work with both of these gentlemen. They both continue to produce work of a very high standard. Everything they write can be recommended, and bought unseen with a knowledge that it will be conscientious and interesting work. Other reliable authors include Yasser Seirawan, Jeremy Silman, John Donaldson, Joe Gallagher, John Emms, Igor Stohl, Mihail Marin, Peter Wells and Viktor Bologan. Garry Kasparov’s work is obviously of interest, but check the reviews to see how much effort he has put into each particular volume, while Mark Dvoretsky’s books are top quality, but note that some are reissues of earlier works, with new titles.
If you are looking for good general works on the opening, then I can suggest Paul van der Sterren’s comprehensive Fundamental Chess Openings (Gambit, 2009), and John Watson’s Mastering the Chess Openings series (four volumes), which goes into much greater depth on a selection of opening topics. These books all have plenty of verbal commentary. For a concise endgame guide, there is John Nunn’s Understanding Chess Endgames (Gambit, 2009; there also a “Middlegames” volume in the same format); for further ideas on computer-assisted analysis, Robin Smith’s Modern Chess Analysis (Gambit, 2004) is the masterwork. If you enjoyed the Puzzles chapter in this book, then you can find 300 more of a roughly similar nature in my 2011 publication, The Gambit Book of Instructive Chess Puzzles.