Customer Reviews

Corals: A Quick Reference Guide (Oceanographic Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great quick reference guide for corals commonly found in the reef trade. I won't kid you, you will not find as much information here as you would in larger volumes such as The Reef Aquarium (TRA) Vol. 1 & 2. This is a handy book for getting quick stats such as lighting requirements, foods accepted, tank placement charts, aggressiveness, hardiness, and more. I bring the book with me every time I go coral shopping. With a book like this at your side you will always have all the facts BEFORE you make your coral purchase!

The perfect gift for that reef hobbist or scuba diver in your life. This book is full of great pictures of both hard and soft corals. It explains the best placement, lighting needs, and feeding needs. Perfect for identification.

An excellent book for every reef aquarists. It's about corals, not like many books out there where you can just read about pumps, skimmers, HQI lamps e all that budgets. Julian teaches us the most important informations we need: the diferences between the needs of each species of corals. This is what we need to know to provide the best possible for our animals.

This book has great pictures, with an excellent taxonomy of cnidarians, written by an author with both authority and experience in the subject. The book lacks, however, the basic and intermediate care descriptions that people would normally like for their corals. Best suited as an introduction to basic reef placement and coral identification. The lighting standards neglect to mention which corals are non-photosynthetic and which are photophobic, such as Nephthyigorgia.

This book is full of fantastic full-color pictures with which one can easily identify many of the corals commonly available. Also includes many rare corals.

However, the text material about the corals, care etc. is extremely brief - much too brief. General care and lighting needs for a particulate coral species is given in the form of bar graphs and placement diagrams. This could theoretically be a helpful companion and summary of a more extensive text about the coral species being described. However, in this book, these diagrams are a *replacement* for the text. In and of themselves, the diagrams are inadequate to properly gauge the needs of the coral species.

I was also disappointed that the book completely leaves out many commonly available corals (for example the corallimorphs ("Mushroom corals"), which are common beginners corals). Leaving these corals out while including many rare species which the average hobbyist will never see seems to dilute the usefulness of the book.

I would recommend instead Borneman's "Aquarium Corals" (which I have and refer to constantly), and/or perhaps Sprung and Delbeek's more extensive 3-volume "The Reef Aquarium" (which has received good reviews, but I don't own (yet)).

Sure, it would also have been possible to include all the thousands of corals known worldwide in this book, instead of restricting to those held in aquaria. But then you wouldn't succeeed in bringing the book with you to the aquarium retailer in order to identify corals in the dealer's tank before you buy. With this book that works...

The pictures throughout this book are fantastic. They are beautiful, clear and even illustrate the different appearances possible within the same type of coral. Sadly, though, the book is full of grammatical errors and awkward writing. One gets the sense the author was trying to write above his level with the help of a giant thesaurus and an overactive comma key. It is so bad, I found myself doubting the accuracy of the information. Hopefully, future editions of what should be a top-notch book will be more closely edited.

What a great start to the series! You can't ask for a more easy to use format. Very informative and staight to the point. And the pictures! This thing is a coffee table took and a reference guide! If you keep a reef aquarium you need to own this book.

If you already know a bit about corals, this is a nice book to have around for quick reference. I especially like that it lists similar corals and gives some basic information on how to tell them apart. It can be deceptive, though. The information it gives on the specific corals is very general, and should not be considered a good source for research on a coral you're planning to actually buy. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm happy I have this book, but I'd suggest supplementing it with a text such as Eric Bourneman's "Aquarium Corals: Selection, Husbandry, and Natural History". This text will actually give you much more specific information on requirements to care for the corals, as well as some better techniques to identify certain corals, since many look very similar, and there's no way any book could show every possible shape and color for many species.

An excellent reference. Information is not as detailed as some other recent publications, but the pictures are excellent for identification. Use it as it is.... a "quick" reference. A definate must buy.