Beginner guitar lessons books

Learning to play the guitar from beginner guitar books is still huge, despite the availability of the more modern form of learning guitar, online video tutorials.

The "learn guitar books" (both acoustic and electric) are here to stay, since thousands of guitar lesson books are being sold everyday, so I thought I would buy, read and compare a couple of these books and see how they perform.

The books I ordered were not at random, but chosen from the top seller lists of online book stores, so these should be the best ones. Or the ones with the best marketing 😀

I am a guitar teacher of 15 years and a technical junkie, so I prefer to steer people towards online video lessons. I believe that with the multimedia technologies of the 21st century, beginner video lessons are the most efficient way of learning guitar from home, and are most advantageous from a pricing point of view as well. I'll add some recommendations for video lessons after the book reviews, in case you want to see that side of learning guitar as well.

Either way, here are my findings after reading through the most popular guitar learning books:

I. Teach Yourself to Play Guitar: A Quick and Easy Introduction for Beginners

This paperback is the best selling learn guitar book on Amazon.com, selling for just below $6 at the moment. It does not include a CD or any form of multimedia.

It is a very short book of only 47 pages, and it covers the very basics of what you would need to learn to start playing guitar. Sort of like a hit-and-run guitar primer.

You could say that the book does what it promises, presents the beginner guitarist with an introduction to the guitar. It is aimed at complete beginners, and stops at the beginner level. It does not include any even remotely complex theoretical lessons.

The book has plenty of diagrams, which will be helpful to beginners. I won't go into detail on the exact contents of the book, you can see that in table of contents in the picture gallery below.

After reading through Teach Yourself to Play Guitar, my opinion is that if you are giving a guitar as a gift to someone, this might be an OK book to accompany that. If you wanted to spend a bit more, or are looking for a book for yourself, I would go with the 2nd book reviewed below, the Guitar for Dummies book. It has online video and audio demos, and hearing what you should be playing helps when learning music... 😉