origami_8 wrote:For a beginner "Origami Design Secrets" is one of the worst books possible. It will bring you lots of frustration. You should rather go for some John Montroll books. They are easy to understand have nice folding sequences and are very cheap. They are sure more enjoyable and better suited for beginners.
While I agree that Montroll's books, and many others that have been suggested are better for beginners, I do want to point out that "one of the worst books possible" is a little strong. I think it highly depends on the person starting out. It was one of the first few books I purchased and I have never regretted it.
For me, ODS was an wonderful starting book. Not because I could do all the models, I certainly couldn't. But the mathematical view of Origami, and the logical approach to design and examining the CPs was beyond fascinating to me. It really pulled me in to origami much more quickly than the Montroll style books ever had. I had dabbled with those books for years, but when I found ODS, it really grabbed my attention and sucked me in to the whole wide world of Origami.
So, for the mathematically inclined, this book may be a wonderful starting point. For people, like me, driven to master the difficult (that you didn't even know existed), ODS is a marvelous starting book.
But if math doesn't excite you, if reading a logical treatise on design techniques of something that you don't know how to do yourself seems off-putting, then this certainly isn't the book for you - yet. For me, and others I know like me (with an engineering/math background) this is a captivating book to have early on.
I should also state that I had this book to read, but several others to fold from, so that I could actually start practicing the things I knew I needed to be able to do in order to conquer the models in ODS. And I've found that I've come back to re-read it later and get much more out of it now than I did then. But it was certainly an important book for me to have back then since it captivated me so. It was exactly what I needed.
Kim