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Would it be any use to a fairly new mini painter with some experience (I have painted about 30 models and 2 vehicles, at about the C+ to B range in quality). Would the book/DVD help sharpen my skills or is it no better than what I can get online?

You can find as good and better tutorials on YouTube, but it takes a deal more time to find what you're looking for and you have to figure out yourself if the tut is the right level for you.

The GW book aims to be a cover-all book for beginners. If you use it you should in theory be able to learn all you need to know to build and paint your whole army to a good tabletop standard.

The book is ok for beginners I guess. The DVD is just the book in video form.

I didn't learn anything from it. All of the information can be found on youtube in better format.

I'm a huge fan of it. Harder to find what you want to know on Youtube, and difficult to filter what's intended as basics vs. what's intended for the more experienced painting audience (persons like Aerethan).

Would have killed for it when I was learning to paint, could -not- wrap my head around the basic concepts required, and it does a wonderful job of showing you a lot of basic techniques, as well as a lot of examples of how to deal with different types of material (red cloth from the haradrim warriors can be applied in any game system for example.)

Highly, HIGHLY reccommended for beginners. If you're an experienced painter, try and find an open copy to flip through first and see if it gives you some inspiration, and check the back couple pages.

It is the most complete and concise compilation of basic painting knowledge and techniques I have ever found in my life.

I'll agree that I'm not the target audience for that book.

My problem with the new book is that it is just a sales tool to sell paint. Youtube videos generally are not.

Although, this gives me the idea to make a starter series for painters covering the absolute basics like priming, base coating, shading and highlighting 101. Then again I use an airbrush for the first two steps, so I may have to go old school on those and do them by hand for the videos.

GW is indeed known for using teaching material as marketing material, but in this instance they're really just showing a painting system that works wonderfully for tabletop quality models. (I could be convinced to concede to a bit of them "selling" this method, though it's not the same, as you've already bought said method) Though I applaud any effort to enlighten those getting started in the hobby, and I mean that. A thousand thanks to anyone who goes out of their way and spends their own resources teaching those who need it.

I've got a friend who is actually fairly disgruntled about GW in general, but when I showed him the book his reaction as an english teacher was "Oh my gosh! It's a textbook for teaching painting! Hallelujah! " (paraphrased of course).

I tried to learn from youtube videos, but I was shown a lot of incorrect steps, important details were glossed over, even in videos where they left the camera on an straight painted a model start to finish with no editing cuts. All in all, I think my painting actually suffered from trying to emulate them. Now, maybe I just didn't find the right videos, but I'm a savvy internet user, so that does not speak well of their accessibility.

Now, they're great tools because I'm familiar with the painting medium and I can learn new ways to manipulate it, maybe even be inspired to try something out of my comfort zone, but getting started, I really wish I'd had that guide. I'm not an artist by nature, and that book would have vastly shortened the time between when I started which was "Applying paint to things" vs. the breakthrough moment when I actually began "Painting".

Since there are crap tons of SM and 40k tutorial videos, I think I'll do a set of one or two general infantry models from each army for WFB. Now I just need to find more hours for my days.

Fantastic. The only word of advice I offer is to really assume absolute ignorance of how paint stays on models, it's very easy to forget the obvious after so much practice. I look forward to seeing how they turn out ^^

I learnt a fair bit from this book.