Hegel was immensely popular in his time but I do not think his ideas hold up well today. I believe that his greatness lies in his influence to be found in the even greater philosophers who followed him. I'd be lying if I said that some of the ideas he brings up in this work aren't interesting, but I wouldn't be if I said that the prose itself isn't.

Hegel is considered a notoriously difficult author to understand, and justly so. But his thorny prose is as much a creation of his as his philosophy itself; it was not because he could not write well that he wrote as he did, but because he wrote in such a way as to communicate ideas that did not come easily to language. That said, it is best to start with Hegel with something like this, rather than the Phenomenology, simply to get an idea of what's at stake in his writings; Hegel's philosophy is essentially recursive, and so the patterns that emerge in one area of his thought are often applicable to others (his ideas on history cross over with his ideas on art which cross over with his ideas on religion, and so on). But if you bother to read this, then go on to read the Philosophy of History itself, to get a better idea of what Hegel really saw in history; because his vision of it was essentially based upon the actual history of the world which he knew (which is now, admitedly, outdated in some regards, but the superstructure of the pattern does not suffer much for this), and the full exposition of his ideas on this subject are only to be found there.

This brief work may be the single best introduction to the philosophy of Hegel in my experience with my college students. The introduction by the translator/editor is a nice synopsis of this area of Hegel's thinking also. Central concepts are the notions of logic in history, the development of the state, and concept of world history. The work is brief and should only be used as introduction.