The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps

Despite the title, this book is unfortunately not much about mindmaps and certainly not ultimate. The content is concerned with a healthy life and good habits for learning - if you want to get detailed knowledge about mindmapping, it's not very helpful. This book might be useful for children and highschool-students, but is in no way academic.

Try instead the book that Tony and Barry Buzan wrote together on mindmaps.

Tony and his colleagues have created a great book about his process or technique called mind mapping. The books justifies why this technique is valuable, mapping the reasons right back to the design of our brains. He uses maps, thank goodness to explain his reasonsing. Going in the other direction, his artists have shown very vividly how the technique can be used in a wide variety of business and personal situations.

I use this book to inspire others about mind mapping. Very few people will achieve the artistic quality shown in the book but those that are inspired by mind mapping will certainly develop maps with greater and more valuable (to them) content than those in the book.

As a Mindjet MindManager user, trainer and consultant, this book is a valuable asset which I carry with me to my events. I use it to show the inspiration behind MindManager, an incredible business information mapping tool. If, it was not for Tony Buzan inspring Mike Jetter, who created MindManager, I would not have enjoyed myself so much at work and elsewhere. Eleven years ago, I sat next to a mind mapper at a major conference in London. Which encouraged me to read Tony's first book "Use Your Head" and mind map my way back from Rotterdam to Swindon to start a new job!

Comparing "Use Your Head" to the "Ultimate Book of Mind Maps" is like comparing chalk and cheese. The former (although excellent in isolation) is dry, mostly white (there are six colour pages) and hard to digest. The latter is colourful, juicy, easy to read but can be a bit like overeating at your favourite Indian restaurant. Everything looks, tastes and smells so good, you order too much. You eat it and then take several days to recover but don't regret it. Also your friends and colleagues will know where you ate the night before because you are going to talk about it!

Thank you Tony for a great book and my tool of first choice.