3 out of 5 rating for Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
It's a solid good product if you're big into FR lore, which is most of the book, or if you're currently playing in the Sword Coast (such as playing through WotC adventures). For anyone interested in it mainly for the character options, it's pretty anemic. The options themselves are solid enough, though the backgrounds chapter is of note: many of them are outright improvements on PHB backgrounds, and few of them have the usual charts for ideals/bonds/flaws/traits that the PHB backgrounds have (they direct you to the PHB for creating these, when they're lacking, which is most of the time). The FR lore itself is pretty high-level, and suffers from the perennial problem of the Forgotten Realms in that it is very generic - little to loot or inspire. If you've got the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, you own a better lore reference already, aside from some timeline updates of primary interest to the canon aficionados. As an intro and a casual reference, the book does its job, and there's some interesting character options in here (my favorite: the Long Death Monk, a kind of necrotic monk that contemplates and gets power from death), but nothing transformative or must-have. For me, this is a book that, aside from a character or two, will probably be mostly shelf decor. And $40 for ~5 pages of material isn't a great return on investment. Still, it might be a good purchase at the group level, if you're playing through the WotC adventures - a group of 5 buying one would reduce the price to $8 each, which still seems a little high, but maybe more feasible if you're not just looting it for character ideas.