I will not lie to you..I never had a beginners book and I don't understand the importance to train with a book your intuition to solve simple tactics as hanging pieces. I believe the best way is to learn from your mistakes going back and studying your previous games...move by move. You will find plenty examples...if you don't...life is good anyway.
My € 0.00 , sorry we Bankrupt in Greece.
But still rich in humour :)
Anyway isnt it better to do online puzzles? There's gazillions of them for free.
To bbgum: I do agree that it is useful to do complicated 1-2 tactics. However, before one learns to use a skewer or pin, one has to learn how to capture pieces. There's no point in skewering your opponent if you can't recognize that you can capture the piece behind it. For the majority of chess players, this may not be the case. The majority of chess players may have a natural aptitude for recognizing hanging pieces.
However, this is a beginner guide and having looked at thousands of games played by novices, hanging pieces are a very common mistake. Most of the members of the USCF, probably 85% of them, already have the skill of capturing hanging pieces down. But anyone under 1000 USCF, I am confident, is leaving pieces hanging on a consistent basis. I appreciate your feedback!
The reason I would not leave hanging piece puzzles with other 1-2 move tactics (fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, discovered check, decoy and trapping) in a section that is marked "general puzzles" is because the hanging piece puzzles are much more basic than 1-2 move tactics. Plus, sometimes I have found hanging piece puzzles on chess.com in the middle of 2000+ level puzzles. I find this distracting because at the 2000+ level in tournaments hanging pieces almost never happen.
To Raspberry: I believe books are better than computers for studying. Not that this has any argument for chess at the competitive level, but because I believe brains function better on paper than on an interactive surface. Research shows that reading on a computer is the equivalent for your attention span of doing a crossword puzzle while reading a book. Additionally, long-term storage of information is compromised when using a computer. I do a lot of online puzzles and I do like them, but I will always prefer paper books over the computers. As a professor of mine said in college, "The internet has information, but books have knowledge."
Why don't beginner books have hanging piece puzzles? My book has 25 hanging piece puzzles which is why it's The Real Beginners' Guide!