Along with A Practical English Grammar, this book has been my companion to internalise the necessary material to navigate through the English language, and eventually unlock the English contents of books, TV programmes, endless articles, movies.... With a strange feeling of nostalgia, I remember the times I leafed this book while sipping bitter coffee in my favorite cups.
One of my favorite ESL books. It's "Advanced" but does detail essential grammar rules which you can use for foundation classes, too. Clear and well-organized, with 23 grammar focus areas and 20 for vocabulary. Comprehensive and diverse exercises, faithful to their more challenging level. I love the rich source of MCQs, fill-in-the-blanks, righting the wrong sentences, improving paragraphs, finding synonyms and antonyms, completing collocations and matching. The only thing to complain about is that some exercises are relatively short (6-8 sentences per exercise. I'd love 15.) This book follows the conventional grammar and lexical exercise book and includes neither listening nor writing section.