While most of the coverage is pretty routine, the text is particularly strong on project work and self-assessment. Brown provides very useful advice on how to conduct projects and his advocy of self-assessment is convincing and challenging.

The book is also strong on the theory of assessment. His descriptions of reliability and validity are the best treatments of these topics that I've read (he defines five different types of validity).

Although the book was written in 1997, most the contents are pretty timeless (such as assessment theory) - but there's no mention of more recent developments in this field (such as computer-assisted assessment).

The book is well written and relatively interesting to read -- apart from the frequent ommission of commas which makes fluent reading more difficult than it should be (was this book edited?).