In the excellent Chess Cafe review of Stephan Ham, he says:
A Strategic Opening Repertoire is a diamond in the rough. With an Index of Variations, and better coverage of some lines, this fine book could have been a classic. I completely agree, it is a rough diamond. Here we are ordering a couple of copies of the book for training youth players. Who all played 1 e4. They do not like studying opening theory, so this reportoire is a nice solution. Through the contributions of Carsten, the diamond has grown, but it is still rough.
I verry much appreciate analysis of complete games. And that it is one of the few books who have the courage, to advise the Catalan and other related openings. Personally the coverage of the reversed closed english in the book is very good, but I rather would have seen the Kings Indian fianchetto lines. Since they are more ambitious, just as the catalan.
I uploaded the new games from chapter 11 and 12. The games from edition 1 can be get from ossimitz:
http://wwwu.uni-klu.ac.at/gossimit/c/book.htm. What I did to solve the issue of not having an index of variations, I put all the games in a tree with chess base. And then it becomes easier to navigate the book.
The introduction to the second edition really mislead me. When I just received the book I counted the games from after 1998, which were said to be the additions. In fact there are several games more added from before 1998, so much more material then suggested. Not all the games can be found in the Megabase. It is also indicated that annotations by John Donaldson are indicated by (JD). I just found once such an annotation in the book. So why is the remark then made in the introduction? Did he not read the second edition, or are not all his annotations put in the second edition. It only raises question marks.
So all in all, it is a very nice book, helping studying a strategic opening reportoire. But it does not give the complete reportoire, which would have made it an excellent book.
Ham repeats the thoughts by Watson and Baburin on the first edition.
Diamond in the rough, some patchy sections, no index.