I think I have to echo the opinion of other reviewers who find the ratings so eccentric as to be puzzling. But my taste differences with Mr. Klein are not the reason for my not finding this book useful.

Books that review wine are renewed every year or so. This is because wines change with the vintage and it's not much use knowing what last year's release of a wine tasted like if it's not the vintage on the shelves in your wine shop today.
Beer reviews need to be renewed for similar reasons. A particular beer is essentially a recipe and therefore it's reproduceable. Last year's Rowhouse Red should taste a lot like this year's. But recipes do change and in fact the formulation of a beer can change from batch to batch. In the case of hops-driven recipes, this is sometimes a simple matter of the changing availablity of ingredients although marketing decisions and shifts in public taste can play a part.
Just as important is the fact that new beers are constantly being introduced and old ones being phased out. A list of beers from five years ago will have a few extinct labels, a ten-year old list will have a lot.
Beer is also more local than wine: shipping costs ensure that only some beers will travel far from home. So `World Guides' really need to be modified to `local guides' to be really useful.

Is this book out-of-date and out-of-place? Well, a quick check of my local Foodery shows that out of the first fifty beers, 22 were not listed in this book.

One of the few books in my "vast" collection that I refer to constantly. The rating system is excellent (0.0 to 5.0). I still think that this book is very, very pretentious (the author has ridiculous comments about which food pairings go with which beers, as if it were fine wine. Dude, they are just beers, ok ?).

But still, I give this book thumbs-up.

A little outdated, quite a few beers here aren't made anymore. Beer reviews are always personal opinion, and you'll read a bunch of people complain in these reviews that this guy doesn't know what hes talking about. I'd ignore what they say, everybody has their own preference.

Think about this before you buy this book:

1) Why do you need to hear what somebody else things of beers?

2) its very out dated... 5 years is a long time.

A little outdated, quite a few beers here aren't made anymore. Beer reviews are always personal opinion, and you'll read a bunch of people complain in these reviews that this guy doesn't know what hes talking about. I'd ignore what they say, everybody has their own preference.
Think about this before you buy this book:
1) Why do you need to hear what somebody else things of beers?
2) its very out dated... 5 years is a long time.