101 Dog Tricks: Step-by-Step Activities to Engage, Challenge and Bond with Your Dog, by Kyra Sundance, is an excellent dog training book. Sundance describes each trick fully, and the photographs that show the steps are extremely informative. Each trick is labeled as Easy, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert, and Sundance shows how you can combine various easier tricks to teach the more advanced tricks. The book starts with a very brief introduction that describes the best way to train your dog to do tricks - do short sessions, keep them upbeat and fun, and use treats and/or a clicker to keep your dog's motivation high. Sundance also describes how to transition away from using treats, and gives some pointers about how to work training into your schedule. In the back of the book are a few helpful lists: tricks by skill level and tricks by sport. Plus Sundance lists 50 additional tricks with ideas of how you could teach them - not only is she showing the reader how to teach their dog tricks, she's also showing how to build on the step-by-step instructions she's given so that the reader can use the skills to teach any trick.

This book came highly recommended to me from members of a dog training Internet board I read. I've only just started using the book to train our dog, Brix, but so far Sundance's method has made it extremely easy for me to break down the trick and focus on gaining success with each step. I think this is going to be a great book, and teaching tricks will help keep our sometimes too-smart dog's mind engaged and continually working on new things. ( )