I bought Real World Image Sharpening several years ago and have to admit when I first read it I thought, "You have to go through all these steps just to sharpening and image? This is bull***t". But then, after trying just Smart Sharpen and Reduce Noise for a while I revisited the techniques, built the actions, and saw how you could get superior results.
My only problem was, using Photoshop Elements which doesn't support the Fade command or Calculations in actions, some of the techniques in the book didn't work for me. Jeff Schewe had a paper on the PixelGenius site however, with a slightly different routine, sans fade and calculations, which did work fine.
Allan