Coincidentally I'm in the process of preparing some recent shots of Lichfield Cathedral for uploading to my website, some of which are monochrome. My feeling is that if the image looks like an HDR picture then I've failed, unless my intention was to make something that looks unreal of course.
I've used Photomatix, which worked well enough but since moving to Lightroom I've used its HDR facility and been happy with it. The one difficulty I found was selecting the images I want to use together ready for selection; I do this by flagging and filtering them so that they are together on screen. I should add that I also use the Lightroom panoramic facility to join several HDR shots together. See
here for an example.
Since I have Creative Cloud and access to Photoshop I also use the HDR and Pano facility in that as it seems slightly happier with the large files that result from this method of mashing images together.
I must add that I'm no expert and I'm sure others have a much better workflow for making this of image. I must track down a copy of the book that you refer to and have a read.