You will find that Straus's method for determining prime form on pages 31-34 does not work. He suggests in the case of a tie to look to the second-to-last number compared to the first, and continue moving right to left until the tie is broken. Try the set [0,3,4,5,8,10,11], and you will find that his method will not result in prime form.

For the most accurate information, Forte is still the best, despite all the problems.

Strangely, I found Straus more confusing than Forte in a number of instances, in regards to the basics.

I like this book a lot. It is a practical, balanced, to-the-point guide. I have been composing for a long time (14+ years) but I've only been studying it full time for 3 years now, and I found that the book really helped to clarify a lot of my thinking about pitch collections, 20th century harmonies, and 20th century compositional techniques.

RE: The Prime Form debate. There are two methods for computing the prime form, the "Forte" and "Rahn" method. This book uses the "Rahn" method and is perfectly consistent throughout. While this is a minor issue, because it only affect 5 pitch class sets (of 200), perhaps it would be good to add a paragraph about the differences in a future revision to help beginniners avoid confusion.

I found that this book is an excellent text and should be used in all post tonal thoery courses. It is easy to use and very informative. To quote him, this text is "Supercharged with cool stuff".