Frommer's Beijing Day by Day

There are a lot of travel guides, and I particularly like the Frommer's guides because they take care to include a handful of very local experiences in each category that are generally difficult to find and more rewarding than a typical tour-bus barrage. I also like them because I am familiar with their layout and know the basic biases of the reviewers (skewed luxury, where there are several multi-hundred dollar a night hotels and just a handful of cheaper accommodations), but one inconvenience is that the book marks you as a tourist and is a bit hard to carry if you're trying to navigate Beijing without a fanny pack. I've always wished they had an electronic guide - like the iPhone app they have for San Francisco. The closest I have found is the hoodhot travel Beijing taxi guide, which works great for finding the Chinese addresses to the stuff you see in the book.

Small enough to take w/you on the trip but enough content to read ahead of time to get familiar with Beijing. Would have given 5 stars if it had more/better maps.