Customer Reviews

The Living Pythons: A Complete Guide to the Pythons of the World

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This author does not go into detail about husbandry techniques to satisfy most herpers. He concentrates way too much on verbal description of the animals in the way of scale counts, etc. A very cursory examination of each python species and husbandry techniques. Jerry Walls doesn't even keep pythons, and the book lacks passion. It is a bit too clinical and dry for my taste. If you are interested in long verbal descriptions of the animals, which can easily be left out with a photo, then this book is for you. If you want a more personal and husbandry oriented read, then pass this one up.

To start of, this book is filled with a huge number of great pictures and photos of pythons and their anatomy. This book is a great edition to a well built herpetology library because its mostly useful only for the pictures.

The author is dry, boring and last but not least very uninformed. He doesn't use the common names for some snakes and instead uses names which could be very confusing like calling the children's python a faded python. Due to this fact the book left me dwelling in many brain farts.

Also, the author of this book needs to take himself to school and enroll in some zoology classes. The way he defines "species" is ludicrus when combined with the fact that he doesnt beleive in "sub-species." Basicall Walls will go against of what all of us learned in high school and college biology classes.

Walls' husbandry and breeding facts also contradict other MORE accurate literature on pythons in some instances. I'll use the childrens python again for example... Walls says that this snake is hard to breed while another more accepted source on pythons by Barelett and Wagner state the exact opposite. This is another great source of more confusion.

In conclusion this is a decent book to buy if youre looking for great pictures and SOME knowledge on pythons. The author is obviously not an expert on pythons or on biology. This book would make a great python encyclopedia(with some inaccuracies) but please don't use it for buying or taking care of pythons.

This book tries to describe most of the living pythons. I only miss certain subspecies. The author tells in a bright way the differences between the species. Also there is a clear way of telling general things like names of scales, scalecounting, describing the habitat and so forth. I've read the book with lots of pleasure and I 've used it several times to look after some details about PYTHONS. Jan Ramaker, Simonshaven, The Netherlands