Every chess club in the Netherlands uses these books as the basis for youth training, it's an extremely successful method. I think it's the most used in Germany now as well, and it's spreading to other countries.
The step that comes before step 1 is useable by small kids at absolute beginner level and step 6 is a self-study book for around the 2000 level because there aren't enough people who are good trainers at that level. In between, it's exercises exercises exercises with a heavy focus on tactics and a secondary focus on endgames.
A subject is introduced (say, the concept of a queen-bishop battery) and then you get a few pages of exercises using the concept. Every now and then, you get pages with mixed exercises where you don't know which of the previously introduced concepts are relevant. This works up to quite a high level.
Personally I had been an adult plateaud on 1700-ish for years, I worked through workbooks 4 and 5 and got to 1900-ish. That was before things like Chesstempo were around. Nowadays I think Chesstempo is good for training the skill of calculation, but Chess Steps is a better way to get introduced to tactics.
I have no experience with the software. The workbooks are cheap, usually all the kids get their own copies and write down their answers in them, if they are too young to be able to write they can draw arrows in the diagrams.
The method (introduce a subject, then lots of exercises) is also used in Yusupov's books, but they are much harder. I think 1700-1800 is a nice level to get to with chess steps, and from then on Yusupov is great.
Hello!
Does anyone have any opinions on the "chess steps" method, either the books or the chess tutor software? I've had a play with the demo version of the software and it looks good, and it's also a bit different to any chess learning stuff I've seen before.
I'd be grateful if anyone who has experience of either the software or the books would let me know their thoughts.
See http://www.chess-steps.com/