Adrian
I've got a couple of Beckenham Pocket Guide books to Golf Courses in Ireland and Spain & Portugal where the
authors - William fforde, Greg Turner and Peter Millhouse - use colour coding to summarize courses.
Gold signifies "a hole worth playing the whole course for," green is for a strong hole, yellow for average and red
for a weak hole.
I think it's a very effective, concise way to visually summarize a course quickly though, strangely, I've just opened
the Irish book at a random page and it shows County Sligo with sixteen holes coloured in green, the par three
4th hole coloured gold (I didn't think much of it) and the doglegged 17th (one of my favourites in all of Ireland)
coloured yellow as the panel view this one as the "one blemish" on the course!
Still, it's all about opinions and these two wee books are great for jogging the memory.