I'd say it's a good book to start on if you're interested in Zen. After this, you could go onto another book written by Watts called "The Way of Zen". This book was pretty easy to understand and doesn't go into anything that is too confusing. It's a quick read though, so I don't think I'd recommend buying the $30 version. I picked mine up at a used book store for much less than half that. Not one of my favorites of books that Watts has wrote, but he wasn't as wise as he was in his later years. Overall pretty good though.