Customer Reviews

Biochemistry (2 volume set), Second Edition: The Chemical Reactions of Living Cells

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In this book you find classical biochemistry, and a lot of it. In contrast to most other biochemistry textbooks which drift away from the topic and go more and more into cell biology, immunology and the like, Metzler concentrates on the central topics of biochemistry, the enzymes and their mechanisms. There is no other book where one is more likely to find detailled infomation on the structure-function relation of just about any enzyme (with the only downside of having only black-and-white pictures, even for structures). This book is, however, to be treated with caution: it is not covering the topics of most biochem beginners courses (or is providing too much information that is about to overwhelm inexperienced readers, respectively). Still, it will be an unavoidable desk reference to any biochemist who cares about enzymes and will be highly valuable at least as long as the previous edition from 1977.

The book is horrible! I used many textbooks to teach students biochemistry: Voet, Stryer, Lehninger, Devlin and others. Voet's Biochemistry although too detailed in some places is good for chemistry majors, but is a nightmare for medical students for which Stryer and Lehninger is great. In all tasks these books are better then Metzler.

Metzler's Biochemistry is simply overwhelming. You will hate it if:

- you are medical student or just a novice in the field. What's the point in reading a whole page about "Does lysozyme distort its substrate?" or next 5 pages about xylanases, hemicelluloses, galactanase, glucocerebrosidase..? Though if you know organic chemistry inside out you'll find 300 pages of bioorganic chemistry quite a good review (of what you probably already know).

- you are a graduate student in biochemistry and need a reference. Get something else. For example, speeking about proteases and phosphatase Metzler mostly enumatates some thirty enzymes, but gives the details for only a few. In this book you'll find excessive treatment of one thing on 50 pages and a brief mentioning of 100 things on the next 50 pages.

To sum up I'd like to say that this book is good for a professional biochemist who likes reading encyclopedias before going to bed or wants to expend his/her knowledge in bioorganic chemistry.

You've got to bear in mind that it weighs 16 pounds and trust me you'll never want to take it any where from your shelf (unless you are fond of powerlifting). Such books like dinosaurs will either get extinct or be covered with dust in the library.