Good Text Book
9/28/2005
I think this is one of my favorite text books that I've encountered to this point. It's wonderfully straight forward and has beautiful diagrams that clearly illustrate the subjects being taught. It's also very nice reading, which is more than I can say about most text books!
Genetics is interesting, but this book makes me dread the subject.
3/16/2007
The most useful features in this book are "analytical approaches to solving genetics problems" and "questions and problems" at the end of each chapter. Many of the pictures and diagrams are also nice.
However, the writing style tends to be rather dreary and over wordy, which is great for insomniacs, but horrible for those who actually want to learn something. Most of the material is presented in a manner best "learned" by memorization, rather than understanding. As seems to be typical of many biology texts, the "what" is emphasized over the "how" and "why". The sections that approach genetics from a molecular level tend to be better than the others, but the writing style is still too verbose.
Probabilities are treated in a fast and loose manner, but I am willing to concede that such use may be common among geneticists.
I also found several errors and typos in many of the chapters.
I tend to find genetics intrinsically interesting and this book could be worse, but if my only exposure to genetics were through this book, I would probably like the field about as much as I would like to work with potassium cyanide.
Riddled with Errors
4/8/2008I am currently using this book for an upper-level university course, and I don't believe it could be much worse. I am no geneticist, but I find errors on every other page and even in the accompanying solutions manual. My professor often mentions during class "Your book is wrong here" or "This is a typo" or "This is what they meant to say." I do realize that this is the first edition, but it seems almost as though the author wrote the book and never bothered to edit it. It's also quite wordy and usually a bore to read. Overall, the book stinks. Molecular Biology of the Cell 5 is more helpful in this class and it's not even a Genetics book.