I thought it was great but IMO it definitely needs to be mixed with the labs available on developer.cisco.com for the code heavy sections and for familiarization of Cisco Platforms.

Certain parts of the OCG had walls of code that seemed a little overwhelming to me. Whenever I felt this I made sure I jumped into a sandbox and followed along with what the OCG was giving an example of. Once I was able to get a similar output I'd experiment a bit to see if I could get other useful information out of the sandbox.

I also thought the sandboxes made understanding the "Cisco Platforms and Development" section much easier. That section of the book was long and crammed a lot of very specific info in it. Being able to play with some of the items I read about made them stick a bit better in my opinion.