A large part of my master's thesis (~25%) is essentially a summary of one book. How to cite correctly and in a tastefull manner? one of the two tasks of my master's thesis, is to look into existing knowledge that deals with the overarching topic, summarize the knowlegde and discuss whether that knowledge can be applied to solve the specific problem. The specific problem is solved primarily with a numerical approach, this is the main task of my thesis. A comparison of the theoretical knowledge and numerical solution will be the outcome.  

As it turned out, there exists a great book that covers about 80% of the general knowledge on the theoretical part. Knowledge that i haven't had before, as nothing specific about this topic was covered in any lectures i have visited. So 80% of what i have learned, is out of that book. The author is well regarded in this field, the book is one of the most recent publications on this subject and is therefore up to date. Hence, the book is my main reference for the theoretical part.  

About a quarter of my thesis is just a summary of the relevant parts of said book. 
I thought about secondary references, but as I'm using the IEEE citation style, secondary references are not allowed. I managed to get hold on a few publications mentioned in the book, but most of them are just outdated and their shortcommings are well discussed in the book.


Is it ok to have one main reference that covers such a big part? I'm using other references to complement where needed, but there are only a few. 
How can i go about citing it without placing the same reference number after every few sentences? Or is it ok to place the reference number that often?
I thought about stating at the beginning of a section, that the presented knowledge is from Author's book [1] and that it is given as a condensed version in the following. In the following text, i would then write e.g.: "As Author states...." or "As presented by Author" without placing the reference number. Is this a good approach?   


Maybe i'm overthinking the whole thing, but i'm just not sure on how to approach this. 

Thank you! BR
Overriding answer: ask your advisor.

In expository work like this, what I've usually seen done is that you start the section with a note saying something like "The material in this section is primarily drawn from  Handbook of Reticulated Splines by P. Smith [47]."  After that, you don't bother to decorate every sentence with "[47]" or "as  Smith states", except where you feel it is particularly important for clarity or the reader's convenience (e.g. you want to quote Smith's exact words, or point the reader to something on a specific page of the book, or you want to discuss Smith's approach in contrast to someone else's).

But again, ask your advisor in case they have some other ideas as to how you should handle it.