Amsterdam Guide Books

• Amsterdam: The Rough Guide. Martin Dunford and Jack Holland. Penguin. 1997. ISBN 1-85828-218-7.
  I relied heavily on this book for deciding places to go within Amsterdam. It has a nice balance between tourist attractions, hotels, and other aspects of visiting. I used its hotel guide to send hotel info to people who visited me.
• The Blue Guide to The Netherlands.
  I got this book to have a broader guide to The Netherlands. The history of The Netherlands in this book was excellent. And curiously, it mentioned things about Amsterdam that weren't in the other books. For example, it was in this book that I found the address of Rembrandt's second house, the one he moved to after he went bankrupt. And it pointed out the house where Descartes lived (around the corner from Anne Frank), which none of the other books mentioned.

  And of course, this book had a much better description of things in The Netherlands than the other books did. Still, many of its descriptions (such as of Den Helder) were pretty sketchy.

• Time Out Amsterdam.
  This is the one that was loaned to me. In many ways, it was the best book, although it was the oldest. It mixed a description of a topic (often history) with the relevant sights, which I found useful as it set a context for what you saw. The book itself was rather curious: Although copyrighted 1993, it was full of black-and-white pictures that looked as if they were from the 60's.
• Fromers Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam.
  I bought this one here in Amsterdam. This book was a bit of a dissappointment. It isn't a very good guide to much of anything, and it isn't particulary irreverent. Although the irreverence that is present is often amusing, at other times it seemed forced. And it didn't have an index, which makes looking things up almost impossible. I did get it for 10 Guilders, which is much lower than the $CA 18+tax it would have cost in Canada.