Well, I stumbled into all this much later, when DS was 10 or so, so I might have felt different if I had a toddler. At the time I read Ruf's book, I found it very helpful. I had become somewhat disillusioned with the IQ numbers which did not seem to capture the whole story for DS. I found reading about individual children, their abilities, passions, and day-to-day activities to be more useful than seeing numbers. When I got to the level 4 kids, I suddenly felt like I'd found my own family--my brothers and my son. Everything I had read so far had been either clinical (IQ numbers) or institutional (how to advocated for your kid), but this was the first book that gave enough real anecdotes about real kids that I could feel a human connection. Imagine fire works and violins playing as I finally found GT chemistry!
I think of the book as a way of describing Ruf's own clinical experience. I guess as a counselor, myself, I appreciate how hard it can be to try to quantify the gut feeling that an experienced clinician gets when we are working with a client. But I have also learned to recognize that the gut is often more right than the so-called objective measures.
