Help on reading Nick de Firmian's Modern Chess Openings 15?

So I am a noob, only ever played the occasional casual chess game as a kid without ever really learning any tactics or theory.  Now that I have decided to try to get into chess, I have been doing the lessons here on chess.com.  On the side, I decided to try to get some books to learn more general chess theory.  Based on some recommendations and glowing reviews that Nick de Firmian's MCO 15 was the "Chess Bible," I picked it up and I am absolutely baffled by it.  Pardon me if this is a total noob question, there someone that owns the book who can explain to me how in the world to read those diagrams? I understand what each individual move notation means, what I cannot understand is the relationship of the columns to the rows.  Can someone explain to me how to read and apply those diagrams?

On another note, does anyone know of any other good chess books that they would recommend to a beginner trying to get a grasp on openings and more general chess theory? Maybe one that is a bit more approachable for a beginner?

Just buy Paul van der Sterren's Fundamental Chess Openings (FCO) instead.  Plain language explanations of the "why" behind each move.  MCO was a wonderful resource back in the day but databases and opening books that actually explain openings have pretty much replaced it.

Hopefully this will help explain some along with this.  This is a beast of a book and more of a reference instead of teaching tool, especially for "normal" players.

I highly recommend Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan. It covers the basics about material, time as it pertains to openings, space and pawn structure.  For a book about basic openings, I suggest Discovering Chess Openings by John Emms. Chapters 1-3 focuses on principles of opening moves. He does discuss some specific openings and popular variations in chapters 4-6. Please be aware there are some mistakes in the examples in DCO, but the book content is excellent for beginners.

You are a beginner

Forget MCO for maybe 3-4 years. Buy Chess Master vs Amateur. And read it through and through. When done ... Read it again. Thereafter get Road to Chess Mastery and repeat the process.

DON'T even touch MCO with a barge pole.

If its anything like my MCO 13 by him it is most likely filled with cooks, errors, misspellings and entire tree columns missing that have been referenced.

Chess Master vs Amateur have an older edition best chess book I bought because there is a lot there and it is explained in clear simple way. Chapter 14 has to be one of the best examples of a game presented and explained that I have ever read.

Those sound like good suggestions, I will look into those suggestions.  I've looked up all the books you've mentioned here and they look like they will be much better places to start. I'm gonna go pick up a few of them in the next few days.  Thanks everyone!

" Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan." I second that.

Burn all opening books.

Instead study recent annotated grandmaster games.

Very good for beginners are

"Chess Fundamentals" - Capablanca

"Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" - Fischer

"My Great Predecessors" - Kasparov

While agreeing with the suggestion about beginners working with game collections rather than opening works, Kasparov's five volume My Great Predecessors, fine as it is, is perhaps intimidating for a beginner. Go with Nunn & Burgess Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games. or Tartakower and du Mont's 500 Master Games of Chess. 

How I can find my opening was played on chess.com?

     Tarrasch's "The Game of Chess" is intended for beginners. It starts with the simplest things and works up to more complicated concepts. He was the first to systematically explain "positional principles". Be sure to get the algebraic edition.

The Most Instructive Games of Chess ever Played: 62 Masterpieces of Modern Chess Strategy by Irving Chernev is worth a mention. The games were selected as examples of various themes (passed pawn, two bishops, knight outpost, etc.). Some of them may be a little involved but the annotation is good. There are also the occasional tidbits about the players themselves. I've enjoyed the book several times and expect to enjoy it several more.

My Great Predecessors are for at least 2000 elo players.

Thank you for all your answers.
After reading them I have 11 directions.
Can you agree on one/ two, please:

1. Play Winning Chess by Yasser Seirawan
2. Discovering Chess Openings by John Emms
3. Chess Master vs Amateur
4. Road to Chess Mastery
5. Annotated grandmaster games:
   "Chess Fundamentals" - Capablanca
   "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" - Fischer
   "My Great Predecessors" - Kasparov
6. Nunn & Burgess Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games
7. Tartakower and du Mont's 500 Master Games of Chess
8. Tarrasch's "The Game of Chess"
9. Lasker’s Manual of Chess
10. Paul van der Sterren's Fundamental Chess Openings (FCO)
11. Nick de Firmian's MCO 15

I know this is an old thread. But I think it is important to point out that Modern Chess Openings is really only 122 pages of basic text style overviews of each opening, and then several hundred pages of variation. Obviously you should read an introductory book on chess and basic opening principles before reading a book like this. But if you just read the main 3 or 4 pages of text for each opening and move the pieces on a chess board you will get a concise overview of each major opening. Treating this book like it is an introductory chess opening book by skipping the variations pages means that when you get stronger at chess, or want to dive deeper into a particular opening you can do so using the same reference you started with.

I only bring this up because several people mentioned that he should read Fundamental Chess Openings instead. When my brother passed away I inherited about 50 of his chess books, and this was one of them. This book seems to be well written and does go into really good detail on each opening. But it is about 450 to 500 pages of explanation on various openings. So if someone is just starting out and is only 900 rated as the questioner is then reading the main text overview summaries from Modern Chess Openings is actually probably a better idea than reading the 500 page notation in the middle of a paragraph heavy fundamental chess openings book. And frankly I like the structure of the MCO book much better because it combines a basic overview with very well structured list of moves. And having the notes for different variations be written out to the side vs in a garb of text in the middle of a paragraph like in the FCO makes it much easier to read through, and then reference later.

But I will say there is a great series of articles on the simplify chess website on pawn structures that I am currently reading that are written for an intermediate level. These discuss the strategies and plans that come from the most common pawn structures. It is based on a similar outline to the book pawn structure chess, but is written in an intermediate style similar to the difficulty level of a Lev Alburt book. So there are lots of diagrams and only modest amount of notation between diagram, but the material is still very thorough and covers a lot of knowledge.

I inherited chess structures and pawn structure chess and both are two notation heavy and intro books like the chess players bible is too simplistic. This is the best in the middle difficulty level version I have found. I think at a minimum printing this articles off and reading them should improve the average rating of most club players by a couple hundred rating points. I wish he did the opening articles in the same manor, but most of them are more of an interactive view so you would have to copy and paste stuff into power point and then print out to get the information in a print out and re-readable reference form. I printed these pawn structure articles off and am going to read through that in addition to finishing the comprehensive chess course book series. But then I plan on reading though the MCO. My club does 25 minute rated games only every Friday. I waist a lot of time in the openings so at that time control if I could cheese people out of the opening I would likely gain at least a couple hundred rating points.