When my mom passed away 2 years ago I kept all her knitting and crochet supplies, and vowed to learn. The lock-downs seemed custom made to try something new. I have watched a bunch of youtube videos, but no matter how slow I viewed them, I always ended with a mess of what looked like garbage. I got this book, because I thought once I learned, I would make cute amigurumi. I started reading it, thinking it would be too advanced, but the way that the book is arranged, made it look easy, so I just jumped in.
She starts with the most basic animal, the chick (which is really just a sphere) and each animal builds on the last with more advanced parts. The first lesson is 21 pages long because it has dozens of pictures for the steps, and the diagrams are very easy to figure out. In that first lesson there are no assumptions that the user knows anything, you learn to single crochet, how to increase stitches, decrease stitches, even make that blasted "magic circle" although it is not called that in the book.
If you have never crocheted before, my only advice would be to practice with thicker yarn, bigger hook, and yarn that is not too dark or light, so you can see your stitches easily. After a few days of practice, I started using the thinner yarn, smaller hook for cute animals. A lot of the videos I watched went into painstaking detail about how to wrap the "feeder" yarn though your hand so you can go faster. Don't worry about that. This book never addresses it, so I never thought about it. Now I think I have a method after 4 weeks but I still don't go very fast.
Since I have never crocheted before this, I cannot comment on how the instructions compare to other patterns, but I found the crochet chart and the stitch table very simple to understand.
This book has given me a great foundation for crocheting. Now I have built on it and have used another book to master more advanced stitches and projects.