This may be too late to help you, but I'll post anyway since I'm sure other people want to know too. First, the disclaimer: I haven't gotten my score back yet. Take my advice at your own risk.
Books I used were FA (used with the Kaplan Qbook while still on rotations) and RR (used with USMLE World during my dedicated study time). Pros and cons of each book as I see them:
Strengths of RR:
-excellent chapters in cards, heme/onc, neuro, peds, psych, renal (which he calls nephro) and ob/gyn. I felt like I understood cards concepts in particular that I had never quite gotten before. The neuro has a good review to help you localize lesions. He gave a trick for estimating respiratory acid/base compensation that I had never seen before, and I thought it was pretty good when I tried it.
-if you're a chart and table kind of person, you will absolutely love this book. The charts are a little hard to read sometimes because the print is so small, but I thought they were really helpful.
-each chapter has ten practice questions that you can do right after you read it to review. They're actually pretty good questions and help emphasize some of the points in the book. You can also go online and get access to another 350 questions, which I didn't do.
Weaknesses of RR:
-minimal derm, ophtho, musculoskeletal, stats, emergency, and preventive medicine. Not sufficient prep in these areas, IMO. You'll need another source for these. The one good thing about the EM chapter was the burn section. I don't know why he had so much detail about burns, but it was really helpful. I never really covered that during my EM rotations, and I'm even applying in EM.
-not enough room for notes in the margins. I took a lot of notes from UW, and my writing was so small that I could have passed for a Parkinsons patient.
-for some reason, he separated out the onco and infectious diseases into their own chapters. I didn't like that the book was part organ system-based and part subject-based. It was kind of arbitrary what he put where, because some onco and ID topics were covered in the organ system chapter. After a while, I got to know where things were in the book, and this wasn't such a nuisance any more.
Pros of FA:
-I actually didn't like FA very much, but the derm section was really good, and I'm glad I had it since RR didn't have much derm.
-I did really like the high yield facts section, which I read over the day before I took the test. It's in a question and answer format like Secrets.
-more room to take notes, which was good, because I got my copy from one of my friends who graduated last year, and it already had all of his notes in there.
Cons of FA:
-if RR is too condensed, this book is too sprawling. There aren't enough tables, and it's hard to review the topics. It wasn't organized well for studying, at least not for me. Still has a separate ID chapter, which is annoying.
-The ophthalmology, preventive medicine and stats weren't very good in FA either, so it's not like it's just a RR thing. MS and EM were marginal. I ended up learning most of that stuff from UW.
-there's not enough detail in a lot of places. I had to use my Step 1 FA book to look things up for my Step 2 FA book sometimes. How ******ed is that?
-I didn't think the resources review was all that helpful.
