Nourse wrote the book at the age of 33 while on the staff of the Chemistry Department at Stanford University.

[1] Shortly before Christmas 1980 he bought a Rubik's Cube intending to give it away as a present.

[2] It reached the hands of a publisher at Bantam who persuaded Nourse to expand the guide into a 64-page book.

The author claims he can solve random cube problems by this method in about 2 1/2 minutes (IBID p.54).

Thus, for example, Nourse gives the algorithm for rotating three corners of the bottom face anticlockwise (solving the position Lars Petrus named the "Sune"[4]) as follows: In Singmaster's notation, the same move sequence would be written: The book mentions speed cubing on page 56 — citing the following times: As of 2025, the modern record for speed cubing is 3.13 seconds, set by Max Park in 2023.