Fun making bear-traps in the garden. The first aid section is really good as well. ( )

Pretty freakin good, I can take a big game animal down if I need to now, hopefully it won't come to that as I am vegetarian :)
But in all seriousness you need to practice these skills if you want to be able to really survive if put in a bad situation.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in survivalism. ( )

This is the full size, original edition of the SAS Survival Guide, since republished in other forms including the handy pocket sized version and (better still) a set of waterproof cards. It's a complete survival reference, attractively laid out and clearly written, but it suffers from its comprehensiveness.

As a survival manual, it could be better organized. You can't flip it open to page 1 and find a list of priorities. The essentials are buried, and information is presented in an illogical order: for example, food (lowest priority) before shelter (among the highest). Signalling for help, which should be among your highest priorities, gets just a few pages at the back of the book, but you get page after page of diagrams showing how to set various lethal animal traps, which in a real emergency you'll never get around to doing. In a real emergency, you want to get rescued within 24 hrs. (This is why you have a cell phone/sat phone/personal locator beacon, right?)

From the standpoint of practical outdoor survival, then, this book isn't particularly helpful. If a member of your party gets hurt, if you lose a canoe and some kit, if you're cold and wet and lost and need to improvise so you can stay warm and get help, this book isn't going to guide you.

And some of the information is a bit suspect. For example, Wiseman suggests using a rock to drive your knife through a log to split it, which is asking for a broken knife; use a stout stick instead, and keep your blade intact. Errors like this are inevitable in a book this exhaustive, and this is a problem: you need to use other sources.

But ... this book is full of information on primitive skills, improvised shelters, fire-lighting methods, and so on. It's worth reading, and dipping into again, for anyone interested in the topic.