A few peeks into the book are required to understand how it was written better. Here are some insights:
A. Character tone and disposition: each character pinyin and tone is indicted as well as the disposition of the Chinese character (in this case, a left-right disposition).
B. Writing the character: a step-by-step writing guide for each one of the 1,000 characters is also included.
C. General Meaning: this indicates the general meaning of the character. Note that the many different general meanings of each character are also included, (as noted in E).
D. Sample Words: the book also provides words with the character in use. This I found very helpful as knowing the general meaning of a character on its own severely limits its usefulness. The words used as examples also happen to be words with a high frequency use.
E. Other Meanings: other general meanings of the character (see C. for more information).
F. Sample sentences: not only does the book provide the general meaning and some sample words, it also provides some samples sentences to understand the character into certain specific contexts better.
Another fact worth mentioning is that there is also some extra useful information at the very end of the book, in the Appendices:
Page 547-548: provides the strokes of modern Chinese characters along with some examples for each one of them.
Page 549: covers all of the various structures of Chinese characters.
Page 550-551: explains the basic rules for writing Chinese characters.
Page 552-555: identifies the radicals of Chinese characters.
