i'm working on putting together a new repertoire, and i'm including the petroff as black. if you're interested, i've discussed my reasons for playing the petroff here -
http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1258593205 so this petroff thing is the bane of 1.e4 at the top level, has a long history going back to pillsbury and marshall, totally sound and imho good for a beginner to learn because it has lots of open lines and 2-3 move tactics.
so imagine my surprise when i look on amazon to see if there's a book on the petroff, and i find that there's only a handful, all outdated, and all with rather mixed reviews. WHERE'S THE BEEF, MAN? the frenchies and the sicilians get peppered with endless literature, "starting out" books, books on sub-sub-sub variations, dozens and dozens of choices, heck, pirc and scandinavian have more literature than the petroff. how on earth has no one written "Starting Out: The Petroff" yet?
furthermore, here in the 1.e4 e5 section there is almost no discussion of the petroff whatsoever! the double muzio and the traxler and the frankenstein-dracula get more love than the petroff!
so i have two questions, i suppose.
1.) is there a good book available that i can use to learn to play the petroff? i got a hold of kasimdhanov's DVD, and it's very good, but i can't scribble notes to myself in the margins on a DVD, i like books a lot better.
2.) why have chess book authors ignored this defense? i don't understand it - all the big boys stopped playing 1.e4, and it ain't because they're scared of the pirc or the scandinavian, it's the marshall and the petroff and the sicilian, right? so why all the books on these other not-so-solid openings and none on one of the most important?
I don't know of any good books on the Petroff from Black's perspective. The only book that springs to mind is Jangjava's 2002 work on the opening, but that had a stark resemblance to a database dump according to one reviewer (Flear or Donaldson, can't remember which).
If you had to use one book, I would recommend ECO C. If you had to use one periodical, use either the Informants or Yearbook (which I have suggested several times before on the Forum).