Sucken at tactics

I agree with you.  Even though no tactic book is perfect, I feel like I've gotten better practice when using a book, I'm not sure why though, maybe it is the fact that you can always go back like you said. 

In my tactic books I always mark beside the puzzle a "y" or "n" (y for yes and n for no) for every attempt.  If I want to re-do some, I can just go over all the ones marked "n" that I failed.  On long or involved puzzles I'll mark a "1" for getting the first few moves right, but not seeing the best defense, or not seeing it to the end (so next time I know to go deeper before looking up the answer).

 Usually (but not always) after I fail them they are obvuous when I look at them the second time. I guess I'll try a book, and the TT if I don't give up all together.

I think it makes sense that using a book (a good one, not arranged by theme unless it's supposed to be an introductory tactics book) is best. It follows what Josh Waitzkin would call the "depth over breath" approach to learning. Logically I think, thoroughly drilling a set of patterns into your skull instead of doing a whole lot of different puzzles never to see them again is best. The same principle should apply to any other aspect of chess study, e.g. instead of flicking through lots of Master games quickly, study them extremely slowly and thoroughly. I can't remember which GM it was who said that if you can improve to a level that you can take 2 puzzle books that you've been learning from and solve all of the puzzles from both of them easily you will have gained an expert level tactical ability. Currently I've achieved that with the 1st 5 chapters of John Emms' "The Ultimate Chess Puzzle Book" and most of the 6th chapter.

EDIT: Another downside I think to the tactics trainer is that it may encourage speed (and a bit of guesswork) over precision.

I used to think like that too (repitition of the same problems instead of different ones), but now I think the essence (themes occuring in problems) remains the same even in different problems, and it's still a form of repitition, they are the same things combined and presented in different ways. I think going over your mistakes is still a good idea, but I would rather solve different puzzles than the ones I already got correct.

I would also like to mention TT here is not the only online tactics server, and there are training types that doesn't even involve time as a parameter in some others like chess tempo. Performance statistics like rating and accuracy are very important parts of motivation for me, and I like everything else (interface, community etc.) more enjoyable than books. As I've mentioned, I also believe improvement in tactics is unconscious and similar to muscle training, so a book "explaining" tactics wouldn't help much unless you actually solve puzzles. I also believe no book can beat the quality of the problem set in online tactics servers because even if they may lack a few informative compositons (which are usually endgame puzzles anyway), the themes are distributed exactly like they occur in real games.

I'm not claiming any objective truth in these or anything, just my personal preferences.

I guess there are two main kinds of tactics books.  There are books like Seirawan's Winning Chess Tactics which have few puzzles and many words, and then there are books like Lein's Sharpen Your Tactics which have few words and many puzzles.

When it comes to the latter, I too prefer online trainers (as long as you can remove the time factor), for the reasons you state (rating motivation, community, problems from real games, etc.).  Still, I know that not everyone agrees here.

I have to say, I've never read a chess book, but I have improved my Tactics Trainer rating.

My lowest rating on tactics trainer at one point was ~950. However, gradually improving and wrestling with tactics trainer (it would be like going up 100 one day, going down 150 the next day, then going back up etc). Eventually I've reached 1557 on tactics trainer. However, as far as its effect on my gaming: not too much.

You will definitely improve your tactics with tactics trainer. I personally like chess tempo better because time is not an issue. Its just that I do both online and books, and I feel I learn more from books. Maybe that's only because I'm an old fart who's more accustomed to books!

So in tactics trainer you have a history of all your attempted puzzles and can go back however far you want and starting from the selected puzzle solve all of them again in order?

I don't know about "in the same order" but other than that, yes.

EDIT: Actually yes, you can go through them in whatever order you want.

I'm terrible at tactics trainer. But I know WHY i'm terrible at it. That stupid clock at the bottom distracts me :(. I get flustered then just guess. MY tactics trainer rating is about 1650 and my online chess rating is 2050. See a problem? I do

I prefer puzzle books, but for the simple fact that I think their puzzle selection is better than anything I see on tactics servers. I don't even do the same puzzle myself (what I do do is figure out why or why not I could figure out the tactic or not), it's simply because the puzzles seem to be better for deep calculation.

The online servers (TT is the one I have most experience with) have tons of simple puzzles, even the ones higher rated usually (their difficulty comes from how little time you often get). They're good for the pattern recognition part, so that you can just see when there are tactics. The patterns are very good for finding the first or second moves of a puzzle (and in a real game quickly so you have time to calculate a potentially strong move!), which is undeniably extremely important.

But the puzzles I find in books tend to emphasize more so calculation, and it's not only because it's untimed (I used to use TT unrated/untimed, but it was clear it wasn't meant for infinite time) but I think the puzzles just require you to look farther ahead for some reason. I don't think that the TT puzzles have that many high quality games, while in my puzzle book almost all of the games are played between GMs and IMs. So these untimed, but heavy calculation puzzles help for the second part of tactical mastery, calculating out moves you came up with. If you can't do that, that Bxh7+ sac may be crying out to you, but you have no idea if there is some subtlety that makes it unsound if you can't calculate more than 2 or 3 moves sometimes.

By the way, I'm not a fan of those "take the hanging piece" puzzles in TT. Maybe once in a really long while just to see if I get shocked they can put one there, but they simply have way too many of them. Some people argue "Well sometimes you have to take a hanging piece in real games", and my response to that is that I didn't come to TT to notice hanging pieces, I can already do that.

I'm not claiming anything about your particular book, I don't know about it, but what I meant was, sometimes authors (such as Blokh, in my opinion) fail victim to the "prettiness" or "cleanness" of the problems they select and this makes their collection biased, this potential effect is eliminated in online servers. When I stopped training with CT-Art (which is based on Blokh's book) and switched to chess tempo, I was really bothered by this effect. I was again and again finding myself in these not so particularly "fun" or "nice" positions, but once I beat that feeling, it helped me at a much faster rate than CT-Art.

I think it's good to get both a bit of realism (tactics server) and intense calculation exercise (books), I just prefer (it's more fun to me basically) the latter but it's not necessarily better.

I think I'm totally in the minority here among 2000+ players on chess.com, but my TT rating is just over 1950. I'm not very good with timed puzzles and they can annoy me but I can't deny they at least help you get patterns embedded into your mind and you can do many puzzles in a short amount of time.

 I really don't like that clock.

It might bear repeating, that "Winning Chess Tactics" is not a puzzle book.   It's an easy to read explanation of Tactics and combo types.  

There are some practice puzzles in the book, but it is certainly NOT a puzzle book.  

 You can set so they are still timed, but the clock doesn't show at the bottom. The time is just shown off to the side where it doesn't show up so well.

Ah... I wasn't aware you could move the clock...that is part of my problem.  I see it ticking down and then go into panic mode.  Thanks for the info!

My tactics rating is around 1650 but my online chess rating is around 1350!

I think for tools like the TT, as you go up in rating, have the problems that give you a hanging piece or a simple 2 move pattern, but require accurate calculating because make 80% of them fail to the obvious move.  Otherwise I don't see the real benefit of it.

For example here's a puzzle from a real game:

.
.The
.
.Site
.
.Should
.
.Make
.
.These
.
.Page breaks
.
.Automatic
.
This follows the actual game continuation, white lost this game because of the first move of this puzzle is a blunder, so solving this puzzle correctly means you would have lost the game too   If black had moved Kg6 instead this classic sacrifice would have actually worked by the way.