Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty good book, 5 stars, August 12, 2004
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Anatomy and Physiology (Paperback)
I found this book to help me with my anatomy and physiology classes. Although I'm not a fan of the Complete Idiot's Series just because I don't like referring to the readers as complete idiots, this book presently surprised me. It was filled with important facts for hard subjects like the nervous system, muscular system and endocrine systems. I would call this book a guide to help college anatomy and physiology students, which is does very effectively.
By the way I also used Tortora's Principles of Anatomy and Physiology for my text, which was a very good book.
I also used the following for test preparation, which I also got from amazon--Anatomy and Physiology Study Guide: Key Review Questions and Answers with Explanations volume 1 is isbn--0971999619 and volume 2 is isbn-0971999627. These two books were great. Actually some of the questions from these study guides were similar to the one's that appeared on my college exams. I bought them after using this author's study guides for other subjects in the past.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Idea, But Needs Work..., April 7, 2006
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Anatomy and Physiology (Paperback)
Save your money. Whether you are an interested layman looking for an intro and overview, or you are a struggling A&P student looking for a map to find your way through the forest, you will probably find this book frustrating. I have had pretty good luck with other Idiot's Guides, but not this one.
This could have been a pretty good book. With some better editing and some better graphic design it would have been alright. The concept is a good one, create an easy reading A&P guide by eliminating (or at least explaining) most of the arcane terminology and massive tables of body parts that A&P students have to memorize, reduce the body systems to simple schematics, focusing on critical cycles and relationships between systems, and present it all in a breezy, fun style.
It should have worked, but failed. I realized a few chapters in that the book is useless unless you have a college level A&P text to refer to. It simply doesn't work as a standalone book. The effect is compounded by a lot of outright editing errors and design mistakes...
The graphics are just plain pitiful. Apparently, they blew their whole art budget on the computer generated color plates which are never referred to in the text, and they are so basic and lacking in any supportive text or labeling that you have to wonder why they bothered (OK, I know why they bothered, `curb appeal', you probably can't sell an anatomy book that doesn't have some color images in it, no matter how unrelated to the text they are). The remaining graphics are stock material that I would guess the author didn't have available while writing the text. The text frequently describes structures which are not shown in the graphics, giving the text a `house that jack built' feeling to it as the author describes one thing linked to another in a long series that is impossible to follow given the supporting material in the book.
The worst sin committed by this book is `redirection hell'. Invariably, when the text and the graphics do match up the graphic is on previous or following pages. The result being that while you read about the house that jack built you have to flip back and forth. Some triangulation between the author, editor, and graphic designer could help resolve this. Further, the author constantly refers the reader to other chapters in the book for related topics. This, I assume, is the promised holistic linking of bodily systems together. Hypertext is alright for wikipedia, but very difficult to read or manage in a printed book. I ended up indexing the book with color coded sticky tabs. Finally, the author does, in fact, refer you to college level A&P texts here and there, but I recommend you get one right away and at least skim it in parallel with this book. I had to borrow an old A&P text from my wife and mark that up with sticky tabs as well. The end result is you have to flip back and forth in this text and flip back and forth between this text and another A&P textbook to make sense of the material. That's a lot of work. For all that I could have just read the old A&P text book and skipped the hard parts.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best intro book available, June 28, 2005
This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Anatomy and Physiology (Paperback)
I'm complete idiot, in this topic. Therefore, everything is new to me, no prior knowledge in chemistry, anatomy or physiology.
I found this book to be an excellent intro-intermediate book. The book is very well organized; material is very clear, and very thoughtfully explained. One can feel the author is passionate about topic and really tries to make the reading as exciting as possible. I would recommend considering external references, since some topics have no pictures, or have insufficient explanation. I would recommend to use google, or get subscription to online encyclopedia (which I've done).
The few things to improve:
1. Extensive use and reference to chemistry/biology, even so author does explain some basics concepts (and does very good job), I still found it's not enough to really understand it 100%.
2. Some details/info could be omitted. It's great too have all this stuff, but it's easy to get lost in all this things. It could be better, if author concentrate on topics that are more important and live some details outside.
3. Some topics have no picture available. It's makes it harded to understand how some bones/organs fit together/where they are located.
I think if one is not going to be M.D. this book is all one will ever need. It has everything needed to understand the topic. Highly recommended.
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