Some people like Julia Child and enjoy reading her cookbooks or watching recording of her shows. I do. As much as I appreciate the informative aspect of her material, though, it has no rock'n'roll appeal. And I love rock'n'roll. And punk rock, too. So, needless to say, with this personality type I am much more inclined to like Anthony Bourdain much, much better than Julia.
Even though he says this is not a cookbook, I think you can cook very successfully from it. Take the recipe (or rather, the method) for making stock and demi-glace, for instance. Even though it doesn't give you that classic breakdown of ingredients and quantities in excruciating detail, it tells you precisely what you have to do. In any case, who really follows all the details in recipes religiously to the last pinch of salt? If you know people who do, make sure to ask them how much salt there should be in a pinch! Can they tell you how many grams so that we can all measure what we add in our attempts to recreate their recipes? Come on, you know you're going to fudge recipes to give them your personal imprint, so why stress?
With that said, I should also state that there are "proper" recipes in the book to satisfy the readers who want minutiae and step-by-step directions (kind of). But best of all, this is was written by Tony, so you get to read about his perspective on cooking, to learn something new, and above all you have the sarcasm, the wit, the intelligence that are characteristic of his writings. I'll be making many of these recipes, but I'll also read the book cover to cover because Tony is funny as hell and he knows his stuff inside and out.
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