There are many more recent go books than Lasker's, written by much stronger players. Many are translated from Japanese or Chinese or Korean, or written by contemporary Go masters who speak English.
--well, I saw some, but none I terribly liked. And the fact some elementary book was written by some 9 dan pro, was kind of like a nuclear weapon to squash an ant. But I think the authors ought to be better than Edward Lasker was.
But best is probably just going to a local Go club and playing games with a strong player. (You can do this online, too, but teaching games, at least at first, are probably best face-to-face).
--yah, that worked somewhat, but not too well. Actually I have a highly unsupported theory that go strength is not well correlated with math ability (except in the beginner stage) and is better correlated with language ability. Have you noticed such a correlation? My language and go abilities both have never been all that good.
It is a deep game, much deeper than chess, although the rules are simpler.
I enjoy go more than chess, but I'm always puzzled by this kind of remark. It is true that go is (in theory) more complex than chess,
--well, it is mysterious. But there seem to be a wider range of human strengths at go, than at chess. That's one metric. And at least for me, I think I can comprehend the vast majority of grandmaster chess games, but not at all the case with go. And a third metric is the difficulty of making a computer play strong, and the fact that even when they succeeded, the program sort of was unable to explain to its creators how it did it. Whereas even the strongest chess programs so far, all are pretty comprehensible; if you read the source code for the evaluator, then you know how it works. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)