Product Description

This book transforms a difficult subject into terms and ideas that every attentive student can readily understand. Major topics covered include: the microbial world, cellular chemistry, observing microbes through a microscope, microbial growth and reproduction, microbial genetics, bacteria, archaea, eukaryotic microorganisms such as fungi and protozoa, viruses, the disease process, epidemiology, antimicrobial drugs, practical applications of immunology, infectious diseases, and many others. The book includes charts, tables, and review questions with answers. Barron's Easy Way books introduce a variety of academic and practical subjects to students and general readers in clear, understandable language. Ideal as self-teaching manuals for readers interested in learning a new career-related skill, these books have also found widespread classroom use as supplementary texts and brush-up test-preparation guides. Subject heads and key phrases that need to be learned are set in a second color.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34178 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780764128455
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
[back cover]
ALL THE ESSENTIALS IN ONE CLEAR VOLUME
by Ren© Kratz, Ph.D.

Customer Reviews

One-stop shopping for microbiology
If you have the aptitude to read full-strength science (the book is targeted at microbiology students), you will find this very affordable volume to be clear, complete, detailed, and well and richly illustrated.

This book (which comes with a guarantee, right on the cover, that it will improve your grades in 30 days or you get your money back!) is thoughtfully organized and covers all the main areas of microbiology, from cellular chemistry to microbial metabolism to genetics to applied microbiology to how disease works to the immune system, and much else. Each of the 29 chapters concludes with review questions, a self-test, and detailed answers to the review questions. This book is serious about boosting your command of microbiology. The author and publisher have done everything in their power to improve your knowledge (and grades) short of sitting your exams for you.

Each chapter is lavishly and clearly illustrated with blue-and-black drawings and diagrams. I'm looking at chapter 18, Nonspecific Defenses of the Host, about the nonspecific immune reponse. The drawings so far have been a closeup of the structure of the skin, with about 30 different types of tissue clearly labeled; a diagram of phagocytosis, or how a phagocyte ingests and digests an invading microbe; a diagram of margination and emigration, or how phagocytes can stick to the walls of blood vessels and roll along them till they find an intercellular crevice to squeeze through to get to infected tissue; a diagram of the fever response; and I see six more diagrams in the remainder of this chapter. They're all excellent--and that's just one chapter.

This is not popular science, it's hard science. This text takes you right down to the brass tacks of how these things work, the specific chemical mechanisms involved. If you're not a student of this type of material already, then you do need to have a strong scientific aptitude (feel comfortable with chemistry and biological terms and processes) to read this book. It contains a tremendous amount of information.

But in this world of genetic engineering, scary flu strains, and cloning, this is the kind of knowledge we should all have more of. I have rarely if ever found any book that I thought dealt with its material so completely, authoritatively, and clearly as this one does. And at this price it's an incredible deal.

If I haven't made it clear, I'm delighted with this book. I will eagerly look for other Barron's books in this series (if any), in the hope that they're anywhere near as good.

Excellent as a SUPPLEMENT to your Textbook
I do NOT recommend what some others have here -- using this book as your sole source of information for a class without reading your textbook is not going to cut it. Your teacher teaches out of the textbook assigned to your class, so the information covered on your test will be from that specific textbook.

This book, however is a fantastic supplement if you are having a hard time understanding what your textbook is saying on the difficult microbiological concepts. It raised my test scores by an entire letter grade on the very first test I took after purchasing it! Highly recommended, as well as Anatomy and Physiology The Easy Way.

great resource for learning microbiology
At over 500 pages, this book contains an impressive amount of material for such a low price. Typical college-level introductory microbiology textbooks retail for about 10 times the price of this book (or more), and many don't offer a whole lot more in the way of relevant information or educational value. You won't be paying a premium for glossy pages and multicolor illustrations with this book. Some would argue that illustrating something like a gram stain using only blue, black and white will never be as effective as using full color, but I disagree. More importantly, the illustrations in this book are clear, well devised and logically placed. The text is also clear and easy to understand. In a few places I thought descriptions were a bit oversimplified, but it is hard to criticize the book for this since it is intended to make things as simple as possible. This book seems well suited for those who are learning microbiology for the first time, as well as those who want to refresh their memory on basic concepts of the science. I recommend Microbiology The Easy Way as a good supplemental learning resource for anyone with an interest in microbiology.