When you're planning a trip, choosing a guidebook is like choosing a travel companion. With spring break close enough to taste and summer within sight, travelers seeking an experience beyond the resort bubble will want to start reading up on their chosen destinations.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of ways to weed out poorly written or insensitive travel guides, except by word of mouth, since they all tend to have the same postcard pictures and catchy phrases on the cover. If you're leaving the country, you want a travel guide you can live with for more than a few days—one that shares your interests, gives good advice, and has a sense of humor. You probably don't want one that sounds like your mother.

Or maybe you do. If so, Fodor's is probably your best bet for in loco parentis. It's the unimaginative, highly practical, decidedly unhip guide. Fodor's covers places like Scotland, Portugal, Poland, and Turkey, although it generally neglects the entire continent of Africa, except for South Africa and Egypt. Ideal for families, tourists who want to stick to the beaten path, and business trips, it has a higher baseline for "budget" traveling prices and is heavily devoted to more common tourist destinations—everything else is shunted to the "side trips" sections which appear after each big city. It can also be painful to read, even considering the relatively bland prose that characterizes most travel-guide writing. And if you are unsure about whether you really want to spend two weeks in, say, Rio de Janeiro, fear not, for by way of introduction to each major region of a country, Fodor's provides quotes from real readers just like you—"George" describes Rio as "a real GEM!!" But Fodor's has its endearing qualities. It combines generally exhaustive coverage with a very user-friendly format.

The Eyewitness Travel Guide series tries to be a more urbane alternative. Like an erudite Europhile, these books catalogue every museum, historic site and well-known painting town-by-town in each country. Detailed drawings, maps, and photographs are the main focus of each page—the writing is almost beside the point. There are even deadpan step-by-step diagrams for using phone cards on a foreign pay phone and, more usefully, pictures to aid in the identification of foreign currency, emergency vehicles, and police. While great fun to flip through and probably invaluable for art-history and architecture buffs, the series is generally a paean to Europe. It features over a hundred European titles but a paltry 24 for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia combined, and only two titles on the entire continent of South America. It also contains almost no information on nightlife, restaurants, or anything beyond the major tourist hubs. This is a series dedicated to the pursuit of culture. And while the visually cluttered pages might be great for aimless wanderers, it can be very frustrating to look for anything more specific without the help of categories and divisions.

For something entirely different, check out www.travelblog.org, the feistier, gabbier little sibling of the big guidebook names. Besides being a highly addictive way to procrastinate, bloggers provide a different, more detailed picture of traveling in an unfamiliar area. It's even possible to communicate with a traveler in real time using the site's messaging system, which helps you feel like you are getting a true sense of everyday life in another country. Blogs are great for narrowing down travel plans—things that sound great in the abstract black-and-white print of a guidebook frequently take on many new, and sometimes unpleasant, dimensions in the world of digital cameras and uncensored prose. Of course, the writing is by nature highly subjective, so it is best to rely on a blogger with whom you have things in common and to do some fact-checking before trying to recreate someone else's experience. Less guides than journals, travel blogs are probably most useful for getting the "feel" of a place.

Last but not least is Lonely Planet, the classic backpacker guide. Lonely Planet has something of a split personality problem. The series' quality is surprisingly hit-or-miss, ranging from the rugged, practical style for which the series is anecdotally known to a more tourist-targeted drivel not unlike that of the Fodor's guides. This mainly seems to happen to the more popular American travel destinations, like Mexico or France, but less common ones, like Turkey and Iceland, are sometimes given the same treatment. It's tough to have faith in the authority of a guidebook well-padded with a lot of mindless hyperbole, such as "Discover! Explore! Paradise!" On the other hand, plenty of titles live up to the Lonely Planet rep. The guide to Afghanistan, for example, is guidebook writing as it should be—informative, terse, and genuine. It doesn't sugarcoat the facts and it doesn't idealize or exoticize the locals. There are specific safety warnings and useful facts about cultural customs, like the observation of the writer who notes the existence of three genders in Afghanistan: men, women, and Western women. You finish reading feeling psyched to pick up your rucksack and sally forth in your Birkenstocks and old T-shirt, eager for your summer-break attainment of one of the knowing, weatherbeaten smiles you see on the authors' snapshots.

The dirty little secret of travel guides is that, as invaluable as the information between those two covers can be, it isn't all that different from company to company. In the end, you stick with a certain guidebook because it exemplifies the way you want to travel, and because it inspires you to start booking those plane tickets.