Battleships and Carriers is a B&N reprint of a book by the same name and part of their compact military reference series, but one that has its problems. It seems that no editing was done and some of the little history blurbs about the ships are a little awkward at times or puts information about the ship out of chronological order. Another problem is that often times the technical specs about the ship are wrong. While they usually get the armor and armament rights things like speed, crew complement, and dimensions tend to be off. On the other hand the little history burbs, minus the poor editing seem to be accurate for the most part, albeit for the modern ships slightly out of date, so as a reference book it's not a total loss. In addition, the book does have nice colored silhouette images of each ship that show a fair amount of detail for being so small. Even with its flaws, I still got some enjoyment out if it as it was a nice that I could read a page quickly in between other activity's, like a computer loading screen or TV commercial break.

Overall you can gain some information from the book if you take the technical specks with a grain of salt. However I wouldn't want to use this book for a report of any kind but rather just as a quick reference to any question you might have but don't want to go to Wikipedia to answer. ( )