Customer Reviews

Catfish (Barron's Complete Pet Owner's Manuals)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A mother of one of the authors, I mean. Everyone else will be annoyed at this book.

The biggest gripe I have with this book is that it makes a big deal about how you should always refer to catfish by their Latin names. It explains in a hoity-toity way that it's really not being hoity-toity to do this, because it's just being pragmatic. It says that it's unreasonable to refer to catfish by their common names, because often a Latin name for a catfish can have two or three common names.

However, after all of that, the rest of the book mostly uses the common names for the catfish, using only the Latin names in the section headings. Except for the "L" catfish, which don't yet have Latin names. Sound boring? It is.

The book is poorly laid out, too. It would have been cool if the catfish pictures corresponded with the catfish that the page talked about. They didn't though.

And, this book talks a lot about the basics of aquarium setup. Like, it dedicates a few pages to choosing the correct filter for your aquarium.

This book looks like it's just a stock book about aquariums that got recycled for catfish. I kept trying to figure out if the writers actually knew anything about catfish, or if they just found a bunch of information from the internet and compiled it in this book. By about ten pages from the end, they finally said something in the book that convinced me that they knew a little, personally about catfish.

Overall, my advice is to choose any other book on catfish rather than this book. If you don't know anything about catfish, the Latin will be too inaccessible. If you know a lot about catfish, the basics of aquariums will be too simplistic.

Catfish (Complete Pet Owner's Manual) is the bare essentials to keeping a few of the myriad catfish species. It is an O.K. book but not very extensive in information on catfish. There are other, better, books on catfish that give one of the largest groups of fish the attention they deserve.