A Chicken in Every Yard: The Urban Farm Store's Guide to Chicken Keeping

Covers everything for coops to chicks to breeds to egg recipes to flock management. Easy to read with beautiful graphics and an attractive hard cover design allows doesn't allow it to look out of place of your living room coffee table or book shelf. Doesn't do a good job covering showing and all that, so I don't recommend it as a guide for 4-H'ers or people who wish to show chickens or for those who wish to raise meat birds. Perfect book for beginners who wish to keep them as egg-layers or pets. Overall pretty good book!

I got this book at the brick-and-mortar mom-and-pop bookstore, so I paid a bit more than Amazon.

The book is a high-quality hardback that is a joy to look at. It's quick and easy to read, though I haven't read it from cover-to-cover, rather in sections as I needed.

There are certainly a lot of similar chicken books available now. This book is redundant to several other books available (on amazon or my bookshelf) though I'm still happy with the purchase. This is the one I usually recommend first to people considering a few laying hens.

In case it's not obvious from the title and book description, this book is definitely written for "city-folk" or people with a few laying hens that consider them pets. I don't think you will find any information about butchering, processing, culling or Cornish Xs. If you are looking to raise a sustainable flock that includes meat birds, I recommend Harvey Ussery's book.

I will add that there are a couple pet peeves regarding chicken breeds. First, what they call Ameraucana is technically "Easter Egger" especially since they say there aren't standardized colors--there absolutely are standardized colors for Ameraucanas. I'm not a breed purist, I have the non-standardized Easter Eggers in my flock. Second, it's Marans singular and plural. There is no such thing as a Maran chicken. They are named after the town (region?) Marans, France. It would be like naming a chicken breed Illinois and calling one an Illinoi.