Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide: Roleplaying Game Core Rules, 4th Edition

By and large, I don't recommend the 4E rules. The new edition has chopped out nearly all non-combat rules and otherwise severely limited the options open to both players and DMs. The Dungeon Master's Guide is the most useful of the three core rule books, but even that isn't saying very much.

What's good here? The advice to novice DMs about building, pacing, and running an adventure is very useful. The basic ideas about combat roles for monsters are useful.

What's bad? Well, the problem is that much of this advice is couched in terms of the broken 4th Edition rule system, which I've described elsewhere as the illegitimate lovechild of World of Warcraft and Hackmaster. It's all about comic-book fantasy combat. The only non-combat mechanic in the book - the skill challenge - is fundamentally broken at the mathematical level: parties need an 80% success rate to succeed at a skill challenge, and most PCs have no better than a 65% chance with most skills. So most parties will fail at most skill challenges most of the time.
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Unfortunately if you ditch the broken rule system, much of the rest of the book is just useless. If you want or need DM advice, then pick this book up second-hand. I expect to see many used copies coming available soon as disgusted users sell off their books. There's no sense in paying full price when you'll have to pry any useful tips loose from the useless 4E rules matrix.

The new Dungeon Masters Guide drops some of the stuff present in previous editions (like world-building and magic items) and concentrates on good and solid advise on how to run a game.

With sections on "Narration", "Pacing", "How to deal with problematic players" and "Teaching the game to new players", we finally have official recognition of the fact that good roleplaying starts and ends with the DM. Some of this advise will sound old to experimented DMs, but it certainly eases the learning curve for new aspiring DMs.

Additionally, the sections on how to build encounters (combat and non-combat), adventures and campaigns are very interesting and simple to implement.

So, in short, this is probably the best written of the new 4th edition core rulebooks.

i ignored the bad signs, didn't download the leaked print copies online, and wow did i pay the price.

this really is a video game without graphics, asking you to put the work into a game that has become a WoW clone. Just get WoW and play with your friends, you will be MUCH happier.

if you want good table top, you're in luck because 3.5 stuff is now becoming dirt cheap. or try pathfinder rpg.

Pretty much exactly what you would expect, a guide on how to run a 4e table, I dont know why people expected anything else. It always seemed silly to me to have the item creation tables in the DMG anyways; it forced players to buy the DMG if they wanted to create their own items. I perfer it this way, you no longer strictly need the DMG at the game table.

If you like WoW, go play WoW. Don't waste 100$ and another 100$ on the all important miniatures and on these craptastic books just so you can play world of warcraft on paper!

Notice how there are already used books available here and on ebay! Tell you something?