Customer Reviews

Confocal Microscopy for Biologists

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This book provides a very "user-friendly" guide to beginners in the field of confocal microscopy. As introduction the author reviews in a compact and accesible manner basic issues of microscopy (including optics, the limits of microscopy, imaging modes and the parts of a microscope) and microscopy hardware always pointing out the advantages and drawbacks inherent to confocal microscopy. The main section of the book describes how to use a confocal microscope in detail, from collecting images to image presentation and publication, dealing along the way with topics such as interpretation of images, understanding fluorescence and fluorescent probes, specialized confocal microscopy techniques and live cell imaging. Appendices discuss further information that can be accessed through further reading or microscopy resources in the internet, as well as a succint evaluation of all commercial confocal microscopy brands currently available, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.

The book has been written with a thorough care to produce an enjoyable and didactic text, containing many hints and "how to" procedures that have been personally very helpful to me when I started working with this technique, being completely novel to ANY class of microscopy.

The wealth of information available in its pages make it a good reference book on the subject. Indeed, we have adopted it in my laboratory as the standard for our confocal applications.

Highly recommended, in short.

This book was recommended to me by the folks at the microscopy core in my university. I was hoping for an accessible technical primer on confocal microscopes with emphasis on the hardware and the underlying optical theory. Unfortunately, although there is an introduction to the hardware and a little bit of optics theory, these sections are very superficial and don't really add to your understanding of the technology (you'll be better off reading the the documentation on the manufacturer's websites, especially nikonU). The aim of this book seems to be to make sure you know what buttons to push when you are in front of the microscope, but not necessarily for you to understand what is that you are doing. The book is not bad. I would trade the section on software (that seems dated) for a good introduction to confocal optics and a more complete guide on how to make sure the hardware is optimally set up (key to get good images) which is also lacking.