Customer Reviews

Your First Marine Aquarium (Barron's Complete Pet Owner's Manuals)

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

 

 

This is a great first book for someone interested in starting a marine aquarium (or mini-reef). It's also a great book for the experienced marine aquarist to have around to loan out. At this price you can have a couple on hand to loan to people who ask how to get started.

The book is easy to read, concise, and covers most areas of the hobby with 'Tried & True' methods. It has great photographs and illustrations to support the text. There are several tables making it easy for the beginner to understand and choose the correct information. It would have been nice to see a paragraph or two covering some of the more advanced ideas currently being tried in the hobby such as Live Sand filtration and plenums as a reference.

Whatever facet of the hobby you enjoy, this book is a good starter. Experienced hobbists may disagree with J. Tullocks stocking, metodology, etc. but they need to remember this book is aimed at beginners not the Bleeding Edge. The methods employed are pretty much the Proven 'State of the Art' for beginners to start their first marine aquarium.

I thought this book was execellent. I learned alot and have set two tanks up with the directions. I have re-read a couple of times for info that I needed down the line and didn't understand at the time. Great book!

Strengths: Good beginners' guide, including a 30 gallon tank setup, start-to-finish. Reasonable "fish compatibility" guide.
Weaknesses: Brief; the description of fishes/invertebrates for stocking your tank is pretty short. The salinity calculation is more complex than it needs to be, and lighting advice is dated.

John Tullock advocates a setup with lots of live rock, and with a protein skimmer. This is the preferred saltwater setup nowadays, as it sets up a mini-environment for your fish. He closes the book with a walk-through of a 30 gallon "mini-reef" setup, including curing live rock yourself (if you don't live where a local fish store stocks pre-cured live rock), which also includes fish recommendations.

I found this book easy to read. Lots of information , but very technical. I was looking for a guide that would 'hold my hand' with the directions. This is a good book but maybe it should be used in conjunction with a more user friendly book.

I purchased this book as a "first exposure" to keeping a saltwater fish and reef tank.
It presented a bit wordy for someone unfamiliar to saltwater--and that turned me off right away. There didn't seem enough information to really get started, but too much for a beginner, if that makes sense. His other book "Natural Reef Aquariums: Simplified Approaches to Creating Living Saltwater Microcosms" (while it did have a very long introduction story) was much better in this respect (it had a Step-by-Step Starter Reef section that I think would have belonged in this book instead.) While "Your First Marine Aquarium" may look like a typical beginners book that you might take home with a tank and equipment, I don't think it covers enough slowly, basically, and simply to serve in this capacity.
Let me interject here that it is full of good pictures and has some useful reference tables.
After reading both of these books, I still don't understand the exact mechanism or technique of feeding either corals or marine fish--something I think is very basic and always simply covered in freshwater literature. If I had picked it up and looked this book over in the store, I would have put it back and bought his other book "Natural Reef Aquariums..." instead.

Wonderful book as an "introduction" to the world of starting and maintaining a salt water aquarium. It is excellent in giving anyone who is think of starting a tank the basics of set-up and more importantly, what to expect as the tank matures. My 75 gallon tank is now 4 months old and has done great right from the start in large part due to the knowledge I gained from this book.

John Tullock is one of the hobby's greats. Anything by him is worth buying and reading -- although let me say that this little book is fantastic. It's a concise treatment of all the major aspects of the hobby from set up to stocking and I've recommended to several fish stores that they start including this work with their "starter" set ups.

Once I started reading this book I couldn't stop until I was done. I have fairly good experience keeping a fresh water tank but I never had a marine one, or for that matter I never read anything about it. This was my first book on the subject and I found it to have
all necessary information to get me familiar with what is required to start a marine tank and how involved is the process of maintaining it. The step-by-step guide on who to setup a mini-reef tank is also very helpful. I also liked the explanation of different filtration systems (Berlin, Smithsonian, Monaco).
The book has more text than photos so it might appear a little bit overwhelming. But that is good because the text gives good information and is well written. Not that this book doesn't have any pictures, it does have good ones, but there are some pages that are just text.
All in all I would recommend this book to anyone thinking about starting a marine aquarium. This book will tell you if that is something you can commit to or not. And if you choose to do it, this book would definitely be valuable as a reference.

Fantastic book. It keeps things very easy and helps people like me in doing the migration from freshwater to saltwater. This is the exact book to start.

would call this more of a fast read handbook, most of the stuff in here is known to a beginner already so i didn't find it so useful.