Who makes the best yardage books?

[TheBiles]

I just moved, and I wanted to pick up a quality yardage book for my new home course. It doesn’t seem to be popular enough to have the detailed greens books anywhere, so I’m mainly looking at the overall yardage guides. Which company makes the best product in terms of information and presentation?

[mttrout]

I made my own using Google earth and their measure tool. Seems courses have them anymore. 

[spinnywedge]

I've used a few from Strackaline and thought they were very detailed. You can check their website for what courses they have available. They have most all of the courses around me, I was kinda surprised. They might be more expensive than others, but if it's for your home course that you'll play a lot, I'd say they're worth it.

[OscarBravoLeft]

PuttView makes some awesome books. Green heat maps, break arrows and also detailed yardage books with measurements to hazards, fairway slopes more than 4*, etc. I wish I had those in college. 

[MattyO1984]

+1 for PuttView, found them to be really good. 

[gandrukat]

Palmer Yardage Books on Etsy.  $30 and he'll do any course for you, just let him know the course and tees you are playing from.  I've had a couple books made up for tournaments and he does and awesome job every time. 

[Carpe]

Very interested in this topic!!! I’ve just started learning how to make my own yardage book and while it is novel, I’m still curious about one thing: companies like PuttView claim a library of 30k-40k courses. Knowing the work that goes into making one book, I have to believe that they have a tool that automates this. I want to know more about how that library is generated and how the tool pulls in the map data and parses it out to create a book. It’s not done manually. I want to see behind the curtain.

[ESP]

Another vote for PuttView.  Strackaline also looks good.

[Tupperwolf]

Strackaline just deeply discounted their books from very expensive to in line with other books. I had paid for the combo book but never used the yardage guide at my home course and was tired of flipping through the pages for the greens so when I saw they came out with an inexpensive standalone green book I bought one and relegated the expensive combo book to the golf closet. I've been very happy with strackaline green reading help. 

[slord]

One more for puttview. Until recently, puttview and golflogix were the primary too. Puttview has more fine details. Below is a good view of those. Now that strackaline has dropped their prices, they are in the mix. Strackaline has 3 green views, while puttview has two - heatmap and slope %. Puttview also is more compact - top page greens, bottom full hole view where as strackaline has twice as many pages. Can't go wrong between them. Additionally, customer service for Puttview is amazing, so there is peace of mind with that. 

 
 

Edited January 23, 2022 by slord

[Hawkeye77]

Yep, made my own, still a work in progress to comply with the new changes to scale, etc. with diagramming the greens and breaks. One of the companies that does green books did a few as samples for our course and they decided not to sell them (wasn't going to make sense $-wise for them and I agree) but I ended up with one of the samples that I am using as a reference for the breaks and it's really surprisingly accurate, but still doing my own.  Working on it made a long winter go a little faster last year, I need to dive back in and remember how to use the software, etc. - totally forgotten all that, lol.

 

 

[cristphoto]

My club has yardage books and they are accurate but I prefer my laser as its quicker and eliminates any pacing off.  In mild weather I walk about 50% of my rounds so this works for me. My laser also works fine for any course I visit where my yardage book doesn't.  🙂 

[dekez]

I have a few Puttview books and I like them.  Except I wish the green contour maps were bigger.  If you are older, you wont be able to read them without readers.  I had to tape some "thinoptics" to my yardage book to have them handy.  And my reading prescription is 1.0.