Customer Reviews

The Complete Aquarium

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic book that starts with general knowledge and background of different water environments and fish, but doesn't waste half the book on this background information. The majority of the book is devoted to explaining how to set up different sorts of aquariums, with detailed examples of the plants, rocks, gravel, and suitable fish for each variety of tank. It is mostly freshwater, but 3 Brackish-Water, and 3 Marine Aquariums are also included. The end of the book has easy to understand GENERAL information about water chemistry, filtration, heating, plants, feeding, and breeding. The only fault is not enough description about individual fish. But if you buy a companion book that describes different fish in detail, along with this book you will be well on your way to setting up the exact sort of aquarium you would like. Great book for beginners and also intermediates who are looking for new ideas.

I found this book after I had bought my aquarium and set it up. I wasn't too sure what direction to go in - I just knew that I wanted healthy and happy fish. I read this book from cover to cover, took apart my tank and started over with great zeal. The book gave me lots of information on what to do and also allowed me to figure out what I wanted.

The best part is the various set ups that are included, telling you what fish, plants and environments go together, from start to finish. If the book falls down in any area, it is lack of information about specific fish. However, in conjunction with a good book specifically about fish (which I think you should have anyway), The Complete Aquarium is a wonderful resource that has made my new hobby much more enjoyable because I now know what I want and how to get it!

This book does a great job of showing how to build different types of "themed" aquariums, be it a West African Floodplain Swamp or a Hawaiian Coral Reef. While these types of tanks are extremely beautiful in each of their own ways, I think that such projects are best left to more advanced aquarists and not beginners. I base this on a few reasons. For starters, many of the resources required to build these tanks are not common, and may require a lot of searching to scrounge up the necessary material (specific wood, substrate, plants, etc), basically a lot of things mentioned in this book I have never seen in any retail fish stores. Secondly, many of the themed tanks combine fish that are not suitable for a starting aquarist, who is not acclimated to the needs and wants of our fishy friends. I think
anyone who has maintained an aquarium and is reading this can recall mistakes that they made early on.
The "Complete Aquarium" does contain information on a community tank, which is fine for a beginner, but this occupies a small portion of the book comparatively.
Criticism aside, there are many good looking, full-color pictures and backgrounds on specific fish used in each tank project. There is also a chapter in the beginning of the book dedicated to the natural fish habitats and anatomy. If anything it is a nice book to have around if you ever want to undertake any of the "project" aquariums listed, or to read up on some of the natural habitats where aquarium fish come from.

This book has so much going for it! It is an interesting and invaluable resource, especially for those who are considering the aquarium hobby. What is so great & unique about this book is that it instructs the reader on how to re-create the natural environment of the type of fish he or she may be interested in keeping. There are step-by-step instructions on setting up each tank, all accompanied by full color photographs. The author includes information on what equipment works best in each tank, plant & rock selection, aquascaping, & fish species compatability. I purchased this book several years ago & still enjoy referring to it & reading it. The photos & information contained within are truly inspiring. The concept behind it, recreating the natural aquatic environments of such far-off places as Sumatra, Borneo, & Zaire is what truly makes this book special. Anyone who is interested in the aquarium hobby would benefit from this book. Those that are well on their way may find themselves reconsidering the choice of materials & fish contained in their tanks. This book benefits not only the aquarist, but the fish as well! Order this book if you have not done so, you won't be sorry.

This is a wonderful book that features excellent, concise information on the science of fish keeping, accompanied by wonderful photographs (this book is published by DK). It is most notable for its large section on tank design, which walks the reader through the design and setup process for 16 different tanks. Each  with the exception of a couple of community tanks  is an attempt to reproduce the various natural environments of many popular types of aquarium fish. The wonderful photos of the different tank designs are an inspiration! The genius of this book is that, (unlike the lavish creations of Japanese and German natural aquarium experts, photos of which are often featured in aquarium books invariably making the reader sick with jealousy!), it showcases tank designs that are dramatic and beautiful, and yet also attainable by the average fish enthusiast.

I have a few criticisms of the authors tanks. His choice of silver sand as the substrate for many of these tanks is unusual. I have to wonder how easy it would be to use sand in a tank that utilizes a power filter (as these do). I imagine it would be very hard to prevent the sand from getting stirred up and clouding the water. Same goes for using a vacuum siphon to clear debris from the bottom, which most aquariums require from time to time. Im not saying it cant be done (I wouldnt know - Ive always used gravel, not sand, in my tanks), just that I think a beginner could run into problems here. Similarly, several of the tanks featured in this book feature sandy banks that have been created by just patting the sand and stones into a slope towards the rear or sides of the tank. Ha! In reality, sloping areas of gravel or sand in the aquarium need to be built up and buttressed in sections. If not, they will simply slide downhill very quickly and disappear.

As other Amazon reviewers have already noted, the choice of fishes for the various tanks can be faulted. I couldnt believe it when I saw the combination of various types of gouramis with a group of Tiger barbs notorious bullies in the aquarium who would shred the beautiful trailing fins of the gouramis within a few days, stressing out all the inhabitants of the tank, not to mention human onlookers! Also, some of these tanks are stocked with very delicate fish, such as the discus, that should only be kept by very experienced hobbyists. Likewise, the author also features some high-maintenance aquarium plants such as cabomba, without emphasising to novice readers that such plants require very intense lighting if they are to be grown successfully.

Because of these shortcomings, the beginner should most definitely supplement this book with at least one other book that includes more information on problem solving and more detailed descriptions about the fishes themselves. Overall, though, this book is highly informative and a delight to read. I bought a copy of this book about a year ago and have used it over and over again. Buy it!

I bought this book when I was first setting up my aquarium. I looked at the aquarium guides offered on Amazon.com, and bought three at once: this book, along with "Dr. Axelrod's Mini-Atlas of Freshwater Aquarium Fishes" and "The Aquarium Owner's Guide" by Gina Sandford.

One of the first things I noticed about this book is that it shares a lot of the illustrations with the Sandford book, and indeed, they share the same publisher, so the same photos appear in the sections on setting up the aquarium, and the same diagrams are used in calculating how many fish for the size of the tank, etc. That didn't really bother me, but it's fair to say there is some duplication.

The orientation of this book is different from the Sandford book, and where Sandford deals with detailed information about individual fish, this book is oriented more towards the tank as a whole, especially in an aesthetic sense. It was helpful for me to really plan out my tank before setting it up, and to think about different tank environments. As a beginner I stuck with the basic community tank, but as I become more experienced I may take a page from this book and think about setting up a more specialized tank.

If you are looking for information about different kinds of fish, you won't find much more than the barebones here. The author describes lots of fish as "easy" or "fairly easy" when Sandford goes into more detail.

The illustrations are beautiful, and the book presents a lot of possible variations beyond the basic community tank.

This book has lots of ideas for both salt and freshwater aquariums. On the down side the common names of the fish were UK names, and because we live in the US we had some trouble trying to identify what the American counterparts were. Some of the advice the author gave on suitable tank-mates turned out to be poor because of the conditions the various fish need (water quality, how agressive the fish were, etc.). I liked looking at it, but wouldn't recommend making this the only book you trust for fish buying advice.

After reading Peter W. Scott's book "The Complete Aquarium", I found it very informative and loved where he told how to build the different types of aquariums. However, I found some problems when it came to the marine animals suggested for some of the tanks. It was unfortunate that he suggested a Mandarin Goby at all, yet alone for a community tank rather than a reef tank. In the book, he wrote that the Mandarin Goby is fairly difficult to keep and will eat live brine and then become accustomed to flake food. Knowing many people who own Mndarin Gobies, this is not true. Mandarins will only eat what are known as copepods (small creatures found in the live rock), and are more likely to starve to death than to ever accept flake or brine. Also, he mislabled the size that mnay of the fish in his book can reach, for instance, he claimed that Regal Tangs will only reach 5 in. In real life, Regal Tangs have been known to reach well over 10 in. and are only 5 in. as babies, unless starved or mistreated. He got the size estimates wrong on many other fish, which I feel can lead a well-meaning hobbyist astray were they to look only at this book for information. For this, I give the book only 3 stars. I loved the aquarium parts and on how to set it up, but I do believe that Mr. Scott should look closer at the facts on the fish he recommends before listing them.

I checked this book out from my local library eight times before finally deciding to buy it. Now the pages are well-creased and written on as I read it so much! While I don't care much for some of the advice on fish combinations, I LOVE the pictures and step-by-step approach to tank set-up. What a treat! For anyone looking for a nice tank set-up scheme, the pictures and plants and substrate lists are very helpful. A must-have for purists!

This book is an excellent source for developing a realistic and authentic aquarium while still leaving the reader with many options. Temperate and brackish types, seldom discussed in basic books, are explained well here.

The pictures are well done. The overall layout describing the materials needed, the construction details, and the finished aquaruim draw the reader into the process.

The book calls for a follow-up volume with more themes and more in depth details to recreate breeding conditions and a more sophisticated ecology.