When I see him mentioning "good" deer population densities as double those found in the highest-populated areas of my state, and 10x that of the permit area I've hunted most...I know there's gonna be a lot of useful stuff as well as a lotta stuff that just might not scale.
The most valuable pieces of the book, in my opinion of course, are not related to southern US terrain, southern US deer densities and it's affect on their behavior.
It's mostly accepting we have a disneyfied perception of deer behavior. It is human nature to anthropomorphize everything we encounter in the world. If you can take a step back, and think of deer, as deer, it makes things easier. They just eat and sleep and try not to die. Once a year they want to have sex. Their software program is much, much less sophisticated than ours. This book just takes tens of thousands of hunts, does some multi-variate analysis of it, and points out the factors that contribute the most to success, or lack thereof. It dispels notions that we've generated anecdotally. This isn't a book of tactics, per se, unless you're a southern US hunter. I think of it as a foundation or first principles for hunting deer.
Read a book or college grad student or local biologist's study on what deer eat in your area.
Read the same on when the deer in your area typically rut.
Then read this book on what you can do to maximize your odds of success.
Like diets, exercise, investing money, pretty much everything else in life - no one can write a book that will tell YOU how to do it in YOUR specific situation. The best advice or books or lessons in these areas give you good data that you can apply to your situation. This book will not turn you into a stone cold deer killer. But it should help you analyze your hunting habits and tactics, and the deer's behavior a little better.
For example, It is a FACT that each time you sit in the same tree, your odds of seeing deer go down. Does it mean that your odds decrease the same amount in Canada, or Kansas, or Ohio, or wherever, as they do in south Alabama? No. But they decrease exponentially. That's not a function of location or deer density. That's a function of a deer wanting to live, and knowing you want to kill it. Bob's point of hunting a spot one time is not to say that's what you should do. It's to say your best odds of killing a deer are the first time you're in a spot. If you choose to continue sitting there multiple times, it would probably be good to know that your odds decrease each time. If you're ok with that, keep sitting it!
Interestingly, his most important factor to being successful is access to good habitat(lots of deer). But just because there aren't lots of deer where you hunt, doesn't mean they don't want to live any less than deer in other areas.
