Better editing? - Rated 
This book would be vastly improved by better editing. Infelicitous phrases such as "...Japanese ships tried to "Copenhagen" the Russian ships in Port Arthur, which was un-expecting and gaily lit", or the occasional habit of repeating the gist of a passage in the following paragraph, are irritating but can be ignored. More serious are the errors, such as the omission of the word `not' in the description of the piggy-back turrets in the Kearsage class of US battleships, so it reads "an arrangement that did work well" instead of the opposite, or a picture of the Russian Tsessarevitch incorrectly captioned as being the Retvisan. Such errors are not, perhaps, important in themselves, but they cast doubt on all the rest. The blurb claims that there are more than 200 photographs; there may well be (I haven't counted), but many of the pictures are repeated. For example, a magnificent picture of a pre-dreadnought at speed is described as being USS Connecticut; later, the same photo is reproduced reversed and captioned USS Nebraska.
There is, au fond, an interesting and informative coffee-table book here. But if it is to work, much more effort needs to be done by the editors. A second edition, perhaps?
Dissappointing coffee table fodder - Rated
On the plus side this book has a lot of great photographs plus a well written and concise accompanying text outlining the development of the Ironclad concept. However there is insufficient detail here for this book to be of any use to the naval enthusiast. Technical details covered include dimensions, displacement, armament, machinery, speed and crew compliment, but leaves out thickness of armour and gun model/elevation. The occasional tantalising reference to the thickness of armour on particular sections of some of the ships shows that the author did have these details to hand, but didn't deem it important enough to list them for every ship.
I realised from the synopsis that only battleship details were covered in this book, but widening the net to including protected and armoured cruisers would have added greatly to this publication and would have been perfectly in keeping with the books subject. What is not in keeping with the books subject are the two pages the author devotes to "Dreadnoughts and Beyond". The book is only 96 pages, and the inclusion of this section seems to me to be unwarranted as there are many other perfectly good publications on the subject.
My expectations for the book were not high as I bought it as a stop gap until I could obtain a reasonably priced copy of Conways All the Worlds Fighting Ships 1860-1905. I wanted to like the book but in the end found myself dissappointed by it.
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