I read a book before potty-training ds6 and it was great -- but I can't remember what it was called! Argh!
We had a fairly long-term, low-pressure approach with ds that worked well. First, we took his potty chair out into the living room. We lived in a pretty small apartment, and that was where we were most of the day, so the potty was easily accessible. And we just left it sitting out for a while before we even mentioned it, so he could get used to the idea and the potty wasn't a "strange" thing. And once he got pretty good about using it regularly, we moved it into the bathroom. He kept it in his room for a long time, in case of middle-of-the-night emergencies. I loved the traveling potty! It stayed at home, though, and we used Pull-Ups for any outing that seemed iffy.
We did the "bare below the waist" -- made it much easier to get to the potty quickly.
We also got two fabulous books about potty traing -- the classic "Once Upon a Potty" and another one called "The Potty Book for Boys." Both very matter of fact, both acknowledging successes and failures. He loved them and requested/read them long after he was potty-trained. In fact, I think "The Potty Book for Boys" was one of his first "actually reading" books!
And we found his currency. He'd never had candy until the few weeks before we introduced potty training, and he got one M&M for pee-pees and two for poop. He was hooked on those things ... but he gradually forgot to ask, and we gradually forgot to remind him, and he was weaned off the reward.
(An anecdote, one of the incidents that told us we were in trouble with him: Ds6 was about 2.5yo, and in the early potty-training stages. After a success, his father held out a few M&Ms and said, "Would you like the blue M&M or the red M&M?" "Hmmm ... hmmm ... I know!," ds said. "How 'bout more *two* M&Ms?" Little punk.)
