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For those starting out in coin magic I would stay away from Bobo. I think this is a good resource for routines, but only for intermediates. The section on sleights is awful - the diagrams are poor even for the standards of the time that the book was first published.
I got nowhere after buying Bobo, but felt that I was really starting to make progress after I bought the 3 Roth tapes from the Easy to Master series. For those who hate DVDs and tapes over books - I don't believe you will ever understand the timing and grace of someone like Roth even after reading Bobo a million times.
The main problems I have with the Roth tapes are: 1) that they are not stand up and generally assume a table of the right height and a compliant audience; 2) he doesn't spend enough time on the CP (which seems to cause endless trouble to most coin people). To augment the Roth stuff I bought Ian Kendall's Basic Coin Magic CD - this was a great investment. It had no routines, but some good advice and teaching on some basic sleights. I no longer have the URL to his sales site but this is the one for his virtual sessions, which has all the BCM stuff on it: http://virtualmagicshow.com/vsession/index.php

BobGreaves wrote:I got nowhere after buying Bobo, but felt that I was really starting to make progress after I bought the 3 Roth tapes from the Easy to Master series.

I'm surprised that you were not successful with Bobo. It jsut goes to prove that some thinks work for some people and not others. I was very successful with the Bobo book (VHS was not an option when I was learning and DVDs did not exist). Your experience with the tapes does bring up a good point, I guess one should gauge their success with either books or video (perhaps broken down by author) and use that to decide which set of materials to purchase. Now after stating the obvious, the Bobo book is much less expensive than most DVDs (about $10 in the current paperback version) so it is certainly worth trying.