This is a very nice timeline book, which contains timelines plus more than 300 illustrations; including military maps, drawings and photographs, brief inserts describing battles and campaigns, and very brief military biographies of commanders. It starts with Egypt in about 3000 BC and works its way up to the Iraq war as far as 2003. The book starts with a 12-page introduction, which contains discussions of armor and cavalry, fortifications, artillery, small-arms, armored fighting vehicles and military aviation. The book ends with a 35-page summary of more than 2000 great battles, listed alphabetically, which gives the date of the battle and the combatants. Being a timeline book, covering 5000 years of military history in 256 pages, the coverage of all events are brief, so a prospective reader should not expect detailed discussions.