Customer Reviews

Molecular Biology of the Cell: Reference Edition

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

GREAT book, but the only problem is that the last 5 chapters are in PDF format on an attached CD rather than in print (they did this to make the book more portable). If you want the full print version, buy the Reference edition.

[Reviewing 5th Edition, Chapters 1-7] I'm a Ph.D. computer scientist working on an NIH grant in text mining biomedical literature, so I thought I should bone up on the underlying science. The first seven chapters of this book are just what I needed. The first overview chapter is an excellent standalone introduction to the cell and genomics/proteomics and their ilk. After a two-chapter very comprehensible introduction to biochemistry (strong emphasis on thermodynamics/energy and bonding/structure) and protein structures, the next chapters lay out the entire process from DNA to protein, including expression control.

It's slow reading (it takes me an hour or more to read 10 pages), but very clearly written, and very thorough. The diagrams and accompanying text are amazingly clear and helpful. (There are also animations, but I've never looked at the DVD.) The diagrams and their long captions are often supplementary in that they add details that are not in the body of the text.

I had read the same sections of the 4th Edition a few years ago. The 5th edition adds substantial new material starting with the chapter on proteins. Ironically, the 5th edition is more speculative, because the more we find out about gene expression, the further away full understanding seems to be. The book does a nice job of balancing what's known fairly certainly with speculative guesses about things like chromatin structure.

This time, I think I'll keep going. The sections of the rest of the book I've browsed when they've been cross-referenced are also excellent.

The publishers have made the standard edition (ISBN-10: 0815341059) of MBOTC more "portable" by not printing the final 5 chapters of the book, but including them as electronic files on the DVD. While these chapters are included, in print, in this reference edition (0815341113), take a look at the price differential between the two. If, as publishers might like us to believe, portability is such a great feature for a textbook, then why should students be expected to pay a premium for this less than portable reference edition?

The chapters in question are:
21-Sexual Reproduction: Meiosis, Germ Cells, and Fertilization
22-Development of Multicellular Organisms
23-Specialized Tissues, Stem Cells, and Tissue Renewal
24-Pathogens, Infection, and Innate Immunity
25-The Adaptive Immune System

With the 4th edition there were 25 printed chapters and 1616 pages: $5.68/printed chapter, or ~8.8 cents/page based on my calculations using list price info. With the regular 5th edition, 20 printed chapters, 1268 pages: $7.10/printed chapter, or ~11.2 cents/page. And with the reference edtition, 25 printed chapters and 1728 pages: $8.36/printed chapter, or ~12.1 cents/page. So the page cost for this reference edition has increased by over 1/3 as compared to the last edition, and is about 8% higher than for the regular 5th edition. Admittedly, I am a major geek for actually doing these calculations.

I am giving the book 2 stars for content, because it really is a solid resource for learning molecular biology. However, with so many students carrying a heavy burden of debt upon graduation, it's a shame to see the continuing trend of exorbitant prices for the best texts, making them just another contributor to the problems with education today.

This is a big book dealing with molecular biology in considerable detail. It is organised in 24 chapters subdivided in small paragraphs each one dealing with a particular problem in molecular biology. The book covers the basics first and then deals with more specific matters like immunology, cancer, development, etc all seen from the molecular biologist point of view. Although the approach is purely mechanistic it uses a clear evolutionary orientation, well explained at the beginning of the book, that helps to give a dynamic framework to the whole subject. This is not a book to be read in only a few weeks but roughly a year's time, given the detail and amount of material exposed.

I bought this reference edition (5th) on Barnes and Noble's website a year ago.
Because I was only using it occasionally for quick reference, I had not perused the entire content.

Unfortunately, when I tried to read Chapter 19 recently, I noticed that it was cut abruptly.
In addition, I noticed that Chapter 17 and part of 18 are inexplicably printed twice while beginning of Chapter 20 is missing.
Of course, Barnes and Noble did not honor my request for an exchange and the publisher seems to be unreachable, as they seem to be based on UK and the only method of contacting them is filling out a question on their website.

I bought this reference edition because I thought it would be worthwhile book to keep for years.
In this imperfect condition, however, it was a worthless investment, and yes, it was an investment at this price near 200 dollars.

Finally, the last draw was the fact that some videos on the DVD did not work.
They simply wouldn't play, whether it was through their Flash program or just through Quicktime, or whatever program I used.
This cannot be my computer's problem because I have tried it on my Mac as well as a new PC, and neither worked.

It's a disgrace that anyone should deal with this kind of an issue on a book that is priced like a mini encyclopedia.

As for content, I find it to be sufficiently satisfactory. It is a bit superficial, but then it is a survey book of an incredible number of topics so that is to be expected.
If I need more details, I can always just go to the journals.

Overall, great content, but terrible binding. Others may not have the same binding problem.

The fifth edition of MBoC (Molecular Biology of the Cell) is great. I have been taking Cell Biology classes and this book complements what the teacher doesn't have time to say in classroom and explains very nicely the parts I don't understand well in class. The texts are well structured and well written. The videos which come together in the DVD really give you on-the-moving kinda way of samples of what you read non-moving on the pages. =)

The book is a work of passion (I have been wanting to write this last phrase for some time now... LOL); but really, you can see how the people who wrote it love what they do. Cells are amazing little things and you have no idea of how they work so hard, intricately and non-stop. You can have a glimpse at the extraordinary machinery cells are.
If you like this area of science, Cell Biology, do buy this book and study it hard. I recommend to all that want to change this world, be he student or teacher.

The single complain I have got is that there are NO answers for the end-of-chapter problems they wrote! You need to buy that Problems Book Molecular Biology of the Cell, Fifth Edition: The Problems Book. Oh well.

I am a biochemistry/biology grad student and I can tell you one thing: this is the single best cell biology book ever written. I used this book in multiple courses throughout my career, not only while in college, but also now I am a cell biology grad student. Since I started in college I have been using this book for looking up anything I came across regarding cell biology.

Not only that, but I also recommended this book to my family when they told me they were interested in understanding what I was dedicating my life to. It was so easy to read, my father (who is an accountant) told me he would have loved a pocket version so he could finish reading it. Truly, MBOC is the bible for med/bio science majors. I've seen myself return to this book so many times during my career that I can't count them.

The book is so great in many many ways. Figures are abundant, clear and concise (and you can even have them in CD, in Internet, Powerpoint, whatever!). Text is so precise and direct that you never have to go back and forth, back and forth reading previous chapters to understand new-ones. And bibliographic references. References are the most important thing in this book... they are so good, so carefully picked, they are really what makes this book a must-read even years after college.

A friend of mine who majored in informatics and is now working in the bioinformatics field asked me to tell him what book should he buy, cause he was having serious trouble understanding the bio part of his work. I recommended Albert's text-book. And I nailed it. Truly, the book is both entry-level and expert-appeasing at the same time.

However, this is a review for the 5th edition of this book, which I bought after my 4th edition book's covers tore apart. 5th edition is greater in every sense. They've updated everything, every chapter, and every reference. Even more, you have now more chapters, new figures, some chapters have been re-written to make them more understandable.

Bruce Alberts is one of the greatest american cell biologists of our time. He and his collegues have compiled the best up-to-date biology text-book you can find. I seriously recommend buying this book if:
- you are a bio/med major
- you are going to work with something related to biology (like bioinformatics, biophysics, biomechanics, etc.)
- you are interested in understading how nature works at the most simple organized level (aka the Cell)

i don't normally write reviews, but after spending considerable time with Lodish, and now reading Alberts, I feel compelled to write one. Alberts is by far, the best book in molecular biology. I am an MD, who wants to enter the basic research area, and this books leads you into that field very smoothly. I am at the 400th page so far, and every concept blends seamlessly into the other. Lodish is good for classic experiments and things like that, but Alberts is a great mol bio basic textbook. I don't know how the next 800 pages are, but I have a very good feeling that they will be as good as the first 400. I strongly recommend this book for anybody who wants an introduction into mol bio and who wants to understand the basic concepts of mol bio. good luck!

Over the course of more than a decade of biology/engineering/medical degrees, this is the single best textbook I've read. It is current, authoritative, thoughtfully written, and wonderfully edited. Illustrations are usually helpful. This book was the foundation of a molecular biology course during the first year of my Ph.D., and it ignited my interest in molecular cell biology, which continues to this day.

The book targets an interesting audience. As a whole, it is a reasonably in-depth treatment on modern molecular and cell biology, and if the reader can grok half of the topics in the book, they are a legitimate expert. On some topics, the level of detail is only surpassed by current journal articles in the field. On other topics, usually the more mature topics where a chemical/physical interpretation is understood and meaningful, the level of discussion in this book can be somewhat superficial (e.g., computational methods, enzymatic mechanisms, chemical reactions, protein structure). I recommend this book to anyone with any interest in sub-cellular behavior.

A final note, that this book is edited by Alberts et al., but the bulk of the articles are contributed by colleagues around the world. I believe that the consistency of editing by biology experts combined with up-to-date articles written by topic experts is the key to the exceptional quality of this book. Well done!

I like to read textbooks (a bit strange, I know...)
I purchased this one about a week ago. I have read it almost every night since then. It's an incredibly detailed tour through the workings of the cell, with good illustrations and lucid explanations. Some background in chemistry and biology is assumed, but not as much as you might think - if you can pick things up quickly, you will have no problems even without a detailed knowledge of those areas. It has an overview of lab methods too, which is interesting.

My only gripe is that the CD is stuck in the middle of the book, instead of in the back, which is a rather awkward arrangement. I took it out and put it in a case of its own. For the price, though, you'd think they could have put it in a plastic envelope in the back.

Anyway, put it on your reading list, you won't regret it.