I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to get into Dwarf Fortress. It's informative, funny, and will provide you with enough direction to get your first fort off the ground (or INTO the ground I mean...sorry). I don't know if I'll continue playing the game now that I'm done reading, as the game's fantasy setting and focus on dwarfs isn't really my thing (nor the brain-hurt), but working through this book has definitely been rewarding.It will improve your perception of how societies function, giving you a birds eye view of humanity (well, dwarfity, technically). Which is invaluable to anyone seeking to better understand the world around them. (On closer inspection, you'll be getting an understanding of how the industries of yesteryear worked, but this can still be applied to the present.)So this is useful not only for gamers but also for anyone who wants to learn about the world and gain a higher awareness about their place in it. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a history/geology/physics/etc. book.I'd like to give a tour of the fort that this book helped me build:This is the main floor. The stockpile/workshop room is really messy because one of my dwarfs, a weapon smith, got struck by a strange mood. Basically what this does is, the dwarf will go insane and start killing people if he is unable to build an object that he has been inspired to make. I did not have the stuff in place that the strange mood dwarf was demanding, so I had to quickly throw together a bunch of industries while the strange mood dwarf stood watching and screaming in his stupor. I even considered killing the dwarf, because I was having difficulty, but then I read his bio: "he detests snails, and was recently annoyed at having been accosted by snails." So hilarious! He needed to live. Luckily I was able to get everything together finally and the dwarf produced a legendary weapon! And he became a legendary weapon smith which undoubtably will be very useful. But as a result of that little scramble, the workshop room did become a victim of urban sprawl.Also, there is vomit (the green) all over the drawbridge. The game warned me that a thief was lurking about, so I quickly raised the drawbridge. Unfortunately, one of my dwarves was on the bridge, and he got flung a couple yards and twisted his ankle badly.(This is one level below the main floor.) Luckily, I had a hospital, so the injured dwarf got carried there where he is resting, along with my stone detailer. I don't know what happened to the stone detailer, as he spends all his time carving beautiful murals all over the nobles' quarters.My soldiers' quarters are positioned right below the entrance of my fort, so they can spring out if there are any invaders.Not shown in the above images: tree fell area, as well as two big rooms dug out below the above floor (the guide told me to dig them out so that eventually I could move my whole fort deeper underground. I didn't do that, but I did dig the holes 'cause digging holes is fun, and it got me the ore that eventually my strange mood dwarf used).Anyway, this book is awesome. It's well-written, funny, and the comics and anecdotes gives you a sense of what the Dwarf Fortress community is like as well. If you follow its instructions, you will be able to set up a fort like mine and learn a lot along the way. In fact, there were sections in the book that I just glimpsed over - stuff about traps, engineering, minecarts, water-pumping - that I didn't incorporate into my fort, so you can make a better one.Despite being published in 2012, the book is not significantly out of date; you will learn enough from this book that you will then be able to learn newly added things on your own. I definitely recommend the digital edition, as this guide would probably be harder to follow in grey-scale.