My coach does not like Jeremy Silman...

I completely disagree, it's very hard to learn on your own below 1500-1600. Almost all books are hard to relate to your own games, and nobody helps you figure out what's actually going wrong.

A coach can go through each of your games with you, right after it was played, and point out what went right and what went well, and give you targeted exercises to work on the bad points to boot.

I find Lazslo Polgar's 5334 problem book to be a huge disappointment. 

It's a great concept to have problems which have as their goal, the reaching of a += or +/- positional advantage - I'm all for it. 

It's just that in the answers to the problem nothing is ever explained - you are just given a variation and an evaluation. Why is this an advantage? Or why is it only slight? These are the things that matter!! And they are totally absent from the book. 

Who made the eval? Is it Laszlo? Is it a computer program? Somebody else?

In addition, it doesn't say why other moves are wrong. I don't see the value for the money - but it's ok, as I got it as a present :-)

       I had the same problem with a saxaphone teacher in college. He was frustrated that he was doing a lot of work teaching for very little money, and Kenny G, would record a few albums, and make a million bucks.

Ask him about Dvoretsky's School of Chess Excellence 2: Tactical Play.  It's much better than a typical tactics book in that it's more about calculation than pattern recognition.  Consider the following:

Oh, active learning is far superior to passive learning.  Passive learning one only retains 10% of the information whereas active learning you retain much more. 

At near expert you should have moved up to specialized books like Secrets of Pawn Endings or Survival Guide to Rook Endings by now.  Still, refreshers never hurt   And a couple on endgame strategy such as Shereshevsky's Endgame Strategy and (not and/or one should really have at least two books on strategic endgames) Bo Hensen's Secrets of Endgame Strategy.

You seem to have missed the point that under class C a player can take Learn Chess-A Complete Course or Chess The Easy Way or The Game of Chess and everything basic will be covered for about $10.00.

Silman is a mixed bag. He's certainly successful...his books remain in print and are almost always on the browsing shelves, and in some bookstores where there might be a total of 6 titles, that means something. 

His endgame manual is interesting and a good primer. His Re-Assess Your Chess was good in a previous edition...now it's become bloated and lost its pizzazz.  The Amateur's Mind...if you've got nothing else to read, I suppose. He did an interesting book on the Dragon that I have. 

> Lazslo Polgar's 5334 problem book to be a huge disappointment.<

Yes, it's a large waste of space. Most tactics books are. Best thing to do is play through well-annotated games of your favorite players using your favorite openings. Use this site or comb through your books to find fifty or so of those and commit to really analyzing them. 

If you are at sea as to whom your fave player and/or openings might be, try the www.chesspersonality.com quiz. It's short, fun, and can give you some notions on both. 

I think the target audience of the book is strong chess coaches who need positions to use as exercises. Or people trying to do it themselves, but then 2300+ or so.

I'm working through Yusupov's books (extremely slowly, small kids...), if I ever finish them I think that's good preparation for going through Polgar's Middlegames. We'll see.

The idea behind tactics books are to get you trained to seeing certain patterns and knowing what to look for when you do. 

Problem is, most tactics books use patterns that come from master-level games. Down in the aquarium where the fish all swim, we push wood all over the place and rarely see those kinds of set-ups.  

So I would argue that tactics books are good mental push-ups for upper-level players to stay frosty, but that for anyone under 1600, study openings and the positions/tactics that flow from them.  Watson has a good series now. 

I improved from 1300 to 1650 just by reading the Amateurs Mind by Jeremy Silman. The book is really that eye opening. Just because the ideas are presented in a clear and easy to understand matter (spoon feeding) doesn't make the books bad, it makes your coach bad for not wanting you to understand the material. I also read Silman's Complete Endgame Course and many tactics as I improved from 1650 to 1845. Stick with the books, I wish you luck!

Removing the defender, pins, skewers, mating nets, etc are patterns you want to be able to see very quickly and that don't require any special setup.  They're foundational to all positions of every level.  They're vital for blunder checking your own moves (and those of your opponent).

Pretty much this.  "Spoon feeding" is a funny complaint.  As if it will be too easy for you lol.

by watson's do you mean his 3(?) vol masterng the openings?

Well, I can understand the term of spoon-feeding : if you can read the book easily, without putting a chess diagram by your side, it probably means you will not learn much from it.

For a reverse example, Euwe's series of Amateur vs Master is incredibly difficult for the target audience (first book is aimed at ~1400, second at ~1800), but it really sinks into your mind later. (the most important teachings are 1-know your aims and 2-find a good way to achieve them, which might sound ridiculous, but it is the book that made me take that into active thinking process)

Now, whether Silman's books are really like this is something I cannot tell, as I have not read any (and I am not a coach myself, so...). The fact that he is an IM is pretty much irrelevant for a book aimed at that level ; the fact he is a world-renowed coach is not though.

He has 12 positions (or so) at the end of each chapter to study with a lot of analysis for you to compare with, so if you put the effort in here it doesn't really seem like spoonfeeding.

to my understanding, which may be what your coach is getting at, is that using silmans reassess or even amateur's mind before having your tactics up to 1700 level is a waste. silman says so, heisman says so, so they're worth listening to. Maybe your coack wants you to get your tactics pattern bank more solid before working on postional concepts. If so, he[s be in agreement with the writer of silman's books, and with heisman. 

Judging from J. Silman's articles in chess.com, I think he's a very good mentor.

There only one good reason your coach should dislike Silman, and that is because your coach is a GM and he sees Silman as a grandpaster.

Can anyone recommend a solid tactics book which would not overwhelm people below 1400, but which would still teach and drill them on what they need to know? And preferably with some explanations to go with it?