I used this book as a first time reader's guide and found it a good choice for this purpose. Each episode is broken into a number of sections; plot "Summary", "Correspondences", which gives a comparison to The Odyssey and alludes to the Gilbert schema, "Style" and the author's "Commentary" or opinions. This is followed by "Biographical/historical" references and "Select glossary", which essentially translates most of the foreign language references. There is also a nice summary of Joyce's life and a brief history of the writing and publication of Ulysses, and an "Afterword" that gives some commentary on the book as a whole.

This book is probably of limited use to the Joyce scholar as its analyses barely scratch the surface, but it makes a nice reference guide that's almost as good as Gifford (I'm Irish so I'm familiar with the historical period and didn't need much help with Dublin slang or colloquialisms, so other opinions may vary on this). For me, I got most out of the "Biographical/historical" references and "Select glossary" and paid little attention to "Correspondences" and "Style", which I think is appropriate for a first time read. The "Summary" was useful as a bailout when I got lost in some difficult passages, but you can find this in free online cliff notes.

If I had to buy only one guide, it would probably be Gifford's [b:Ulysses Annotated: Revised and Expanded Edition|882850|Ulysses Annotated Revised and Expanded Edition|Don Gifford|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348084322s/882850.jpg|13227], but Ulysses Unbound got me 95% of what I wanted and is a lot easier to carry around! ( )