If you've ever wanted to REALLY learn the constellations, this is the best book ever written to do just that. Rey's style of depicting the characters up in the night sky as stick figures makes them very easy to find, learn, and remember for both children and adults. Rey uses the English translation of the constellation names, making them even more user-friendly (though he also gives their classical names, as well).Other methods use only the brightest stars contained within the constellation and draw lines between them to form odd-shaped geometric figures which don't really have anything to do with their namesake. For example: Hercules, using the Rey method, looks like a stick-figure man running and brandishing a club. The geometric style shows a box with lines radiating out, away from it, sort of like a childish pinwheel. Believe it or not, there are some people who are actually devoted to this non-sensical method of showing constellations(!) and hate the Rey system because it's not the way *they* learned them.Rey's book also contains a wealth of other, more technical, information about our solar system, how the Earth's sky has its own mapping grid (similar to the Earth's lines of latitude and longitude), and there are even easy-to-use tables for finding the visible planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) at any time of the year for the next ten years.As a child, I tried to learn the constellations from books and charts that used the geometric style, and after a few tries, gave up. The names meant nothing to me, and the shapes were dull and made no sense. Then I got hold of "The Stars: A New Way To See Them," by H.A. Rey, and within 6 months I found and memorized more than half of the constellations visible from light-polluted San Jose.Detractors say learning Rey's constellations will make learning the "standard" or "conventional" (i.e. "dull" or "nonsensical") constellations more difficult. Pure poppycock. I have had zero problem with this, and can use both methods as easily as you might interpret a stop sign using the word "stop," or one using the international "no" symbol over an upraised palm. There's a huge advantage to learning Rey's method, in that you can use it to get people interested in astronomy much more easily!I'm into amateur astronomy, now, heavily involved with volunteer work at the local observatory. It's the highlight of my night to be able to hear children say, "I can see it! I can see it!" when I point out a constellation to them, and show it to them in Rey's book. Who knows? Maybe I've started something for those kids...PS: This book was endorsed by Albert Einstein. Really!