Although the book has no real competitor at the moment, I wouldn’t recommend it to others anymore unless they want a good introduction on how to use blender. Firstly because of the outdated blender-version, and secondly – which is the major point – it uses some really complicated techniques and the book does not cover every part on constructing real-looking houses (f.e. roof is missing completely).

Vaclav Chaloupka has made some video-tutorials on how to do it better. He constructs his house based on a blueprint and shows some nice tricks and techniques on how to setup a roof, stairs, windows and furnitures. Moreover he covers some lighting and texturing-tricks and does an animation too and concentrates in a separate video on how to reduce rendering time with the usage of composition-rendering. So those videos extend the topic of the book by far and are by the way easy to follow and motivating too as you see all results in color.

So here is the link of those video-tutorials. Hope it will help you as much as it did for me: http://blender-house.spaces.live.com/