Apologies for the thread necro, but I finally got my copy the other day. Here are my first impressions after browsing through it and reading the first 60 pages.
This book is BIG. It's a ~470 page table-shaking hardcover divided into 19 chapters. Friedman has a reputation for being dry, but I've found it fairly easy and fascinating reading. The first two chapters do an excellent job summarizing certain aspects of Royal Navy organization, a history of British battleship bridge arrangements, armor, guns, fire control, torpedoes, and underwater protection in the period covered by the book, and the run-up to the Dreadnought revolution. I've read British Battleships of World War Two and the three books by R.A. Burt, but this one seems to add to them without totally replacing them. Again, I'm only about 1/7th of the way through, but I'm sure it'll keep on delivering.
There's a fairly lengthy chapter focusing on battleships designed for export. Raven/Roberts and Burt barely touched on this, so I'm looking forward to reading this part.
There's a color section in the middle reproducing a number of Admiralty draughts as fold-outs. They're really nicely reproduced, but you need a good magnifying glass to really appreciated them. There's a four-page fold-out showing a longitudinal section through Valiant in 1939 that's absolutely stunning. Wish Seaforth would offer it separately (hint, hint...)
The photos are generally of very good quality, although some of them have annoying gutter problems. The plans are a bit of a disappointment. They're nicely detailed, but reproduced at too small of scale (between 1:600 and 1:900), and look rather washed out. Good to see Alan Raven and John Roberts' work in the same book for the first time in decades, but the way it's presented here doesn't really do it justice.
Verdict so far: Better than British Cruisers of the Victorian Era, but not quite as good as the better books in Friedman's Illustrated Design History series. Extremely informative, has many new insights, but comes across as a bit of a Frankenstein affair at times.
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