What To Expect -The First Year by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E Murkoff and Sandee E Hathaway

When you are in crises mode in the early days, this book makes it hard to find the information you're looking for, as it guesses when you might ask a question by age rather than just arranging them by topic. It does have a lot of info and lists and lists of ideas for solving problems. But I think it is pretty alarmist and suggests that parenting is quite difficult, really. For example, if you wanted to know what foods your baby could eat at what stage, you'd struggle to find out and even if you wanted to know what foods the authors thought your baby should be eating at what stage you'd be in difficulty, it's so oddly arranged and full of contradictory thoughts about what's a finger food and what's a choking hazard.

Comments from other Mumsnetters:

"Written in the familiar what to expect Q and A style it's a collection of simple, easy to understand advice, that as a first time mum with no experience of kids I found really useful.""Split into monthly age groups it's comprehensive and easy to refer to if you have a specific problem." "Not a barrel of laughs, but it offers practical, prescriptive, non-controversial advice on all sorts of problems in a readable form," and is " very helpful." The only problem for me was finding the time to read it and cope with a new baby at the same time!"

Invaluable.

It isn't perfect, but this had the widest range of information in a non-preachy way of all the books I had. Very often, I would have a question and find that their FAQ-style had the exact same question.

I found this book too prescriptive, and it also quietly undermined breastfeeding in a subtle way, I threw my copy away rather than hand it on as I usually do with books

As first time parents this book has been absolutely invaluable. Every concern or question we have come up with seems to be covered in this book in a very non-judgemental way. It's set out in a month by month format which hasn't alway fitted in with our baby son but the index is very helpful when trying to find the answers we needed.