This is an advanced text that's not worth reading if you're a beginner. There are much better books that will put your feet on the ground running. At the beginner level I recommend a few "Introduction to meditation" or "Meditation for beginner books" as well as a few basic books on Buddhism such as Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching
" if you're working within a Buddhist paradigm. At an intermediate level I recommend
Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond for mastering jhanas (by Ajahn Brahm), MCTB (for more jhanas and insight information) and Mindfulness in Plain English
(by Bhante Gunaratana).
At a more advanced level the Visuddhimagga is useful as a reference as it contains some rather esoteric information on kasina colors, the "powers," and some interesting details and frameworks regarding the insight stages. It's not something I, personally, would sit down and read, like a novel, cover to cover. I tend to read that kind of stuff by skipping around the book a lot and then eventually gathering a large percentage of the information from the book, in this manner, through various sessions of doing this. The suttas are also good reading, but in my experience, I've read a fair amount of the suttas just by reading this forum as people tend to link to them and I read them and then the salient ones tend to get repeated throughout various forums on the internet.
Other slightly more advanced books I recommend are anything by Reginald Ray: "Indestructible Truth" and "Touching Enligthenment" are good ones. These books are from a Tibetan perspective and might confuse a beginner who would be better off keeping with the Theravada perspective of MCTB until they have obtained more experience with meditation and perhaps a path or two.