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I′ve been reading that it is best to vary repetitions in your exercising, sometimes 5 reps, sometimes 10 and 15 reps. Total reps per exercise in the 25-40 range. What do you think?

Me thinks, that training as hard as you can, while using good form and focusing on either increasing the weight on the bar or reps is the road to progress, in muscle and strength.

Higher reps for the upper body, over 12, makes progression slow and difficult. While the lower body works quite well with this approach.

A muscle can do one of three things get stronger, stay the same or get weaker – nothing else is possible 🙂

The body has no idea how many reps you are doing. Every rep leading up to the last nearly impossible rep is just a means to the end, or a warm up in many cases. By using a medium rep range, say 6-10, you make it safer on the joints and connective tissues and put yourself under a longer TUL as opposed to doing 1-3 reps.
I agree with Natureboy. Increasing the weight on the bar or number of reps with a given weight (progression) is what really matters.
As far as varying your rep ranges, it′s really no different than switching exercises. Muscles contract, people get bored.

I think most of these magazines, personal trainers, "experts" want to make it seem like working out is such a baffling, complex thing that they need to get paid by an "amateur" to have a good routine. Basice exercises, hard, to failure training, 6-10 rep ranges isn′t that complicated but seems to work great.

Dave t..
You′re right. They have to fill their pages somehow otherwise they wouldn′t have a magazine to sell every month. There′s no other reason to change your routine every 4-6 weeks, or vary your rep range, or do incline barbell presses one workout, and decline dumbbell presses the next workout, which is the mentality of most of these magazine "experts". Arthur Jones once said that productive training can be summed up in a few words…Train hard, train brief, train infrequently. You can train hard, or you can train long, but you can′t do both, as it is literally impossible.
The body only knows stress. It has no idea that you are doing a set of deadlifts or 5 sets of leg presses. It only knows that it′s being stressed and must lay down more muscle tissue in order to protect itself from future stresses of the same magnitude.