Customer Reviews

Molecular Cell Biology

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a reference book, this book is handy to have. As a primary textbook for the classroom, this book is impossible. Each subsection of each chapter is overwhelmed with details of a process as it pertains to a variety of model systems. With the increasing amount of information on molecular biology available to us, it becomes vital that authors are able to extract key concepts, present them clearly, and then support them with detailed examples. The authors of this book instead have presented page after page of details, leaving the reader to wonder exactly what it was they were supposed to glean from the forgoing monolith. I found Albert's text to be far superior in readability and organization.

This book is an essential tool for both students and professionals that need to broaden their knowledge in molecular cell biology. It provides the fundamental concepts and contains high quality illustrations/graphics. The CD-ROM is also a valuable tool that one can have as it contains basically the book itself.

The book matches PERFECTLY to the previous edition... with loads of cut and paste of partial paragraphs. The result is that you could never find your way through a class using this edition with the previous edition: curbs the used book market. There is nothing more. No 'cutting edge technology' and minimal new info... not worth a new edition. All the "hard work" of putting together this edition was NOT done by the Authors, but by "hardworking" editors: NOT scientists. It isn't presenting any new science worthy of a new edition... thats just an appeal.
The editing may have taken a lot of work but they obviously had a deadline! The combinations of sentences formed for the new edition from sentences edited from this and that chapter of the old edition are grammatical nightmares!
The illustrations are also second rate.
Why this book is popular must be a source of wonder to the editors. Half baked edition with undeserved popularity.
Worse, the language hashed was difficult to begin with. A biologist who studied from this text would be a giggle to have around.

Excellent. Hands down the best book out there for cell biology. Gives a thorough look at the exciting unraveling of the cell. Figures are exceptional. However, being now ~3 years old and due to the intense output and growth of scientific literature this book is starting to get outdated. There have been several advances in a number of transport systems (i.e. Nuclear transport and regulation of gene expression). A new edition in the next year or so would hopefully address these issues.

This is a very comprehensive book about molecular cell biology. It starts from the very basics of chemistry and protein, and ends with a very clear molecular description of cell cycles and cancer. I wouldn't recommend it as a textbook for someone who's just learning the basics, especially if it is for a class, since the amount of information is sometimes too much to handle.

Pros:
1- Extensive coverage of most major topics in cell biology.
2- Impressive level of detail, down to the function of the secondary structures in proteins.
3- Very interesting explanations about how things were discovered.
4- Each chapter section is divided into points. The authors show you how every point was proved. For example, to tell you vesicles need this protein to bind to other membranes, they tell you that some biologist created mutants that were lacking this protein and noticed that the vesicles were formed but were unable to bind, and a reference is present at the end of the chapter.
5- Small summaries at the end of each section.
6- Kept really up to date. Current articles in Nature & Science magazine usually take over where this book left off.

Cons:
1- There are some exercises at the end of each chapter, but they're too simple to be of any value to you except reviewing the high level concepts. There is only one "Analyzing the Data" exercise which brings some value. If you haven't memorized every single protein, you can always flip back a few pages and read off the name that you're looking for. The study guide that comes with it also doesn't have very much information. You can look at their website online but will only find multiple choice questions. The Alberts book + study guide on the other hand, does give you about 100 exercises per chapter, and that really helped me understand certain concepts.
2- The book is nearly a thousand pages long and it is presented in two-column, small font mode. I found that it took me several hours to read through a single chapter.
3- Somewhat inconsistent writing. Some chapters adopt a very narrative description that is smooth and easy to read. Other chapters just name every single protein involved and through a disordered approach expect you to put things together. Not to mention many of the proteins have the same prefix but different numbers at the end "Tom40, Tom22, Tom76". Such data would look much better tabulated.

This text is excellent in the coverage of its subject matter, but, like typical texts and journal articles written by a myriad of authors, it lacks coherence. Thus, separating the wheat from the chaff is tedious. The book, if well written, could be much shorter and more readable than it currently is.

I like this book. There's a good amount of content, accompanied with excellent illustrations. However, the organization is pretty bad -- instead of describing processes such as transcription in a natural sequence, the authors jump around from one thing to another, making it hard to find things. The index isn't comprehensive enough, either.

one more caveat: my Cell Phys professor, who's a botanist, complained about the lack of coverage of plant cells, and he's right.

I am very much happy to have this book. Most of praising sentences being shared with preceding commentators, here I'd like to add one more. The CD is really wonderful! It's well edited and organized. Beautiful pictures and movies must be an ideal tool to learn newest knowledges those are day by day going complicated. To understand something unknown topics in the cellular biology, I assure watching CD will be much time-saving. After you have learnt a basic concept on some topic by using CD, you can learn more details by the book, if necessary. I think CD is not merely an "attachment", but the book and CD should be complementary for the best learning.

This book is so scattered and disjointed. Topics don't flow, random jumps are made, and the text is written poorly to top it off. If you're going to get a cell biology book, get Molecular Biology of the Cell, Fourth Edition by Bruce Alberts. Might be a bit thicker but for the same price you get much better information.

This is a very good text book for a senior undergraduate, or introductory graduate level, course and students. I am a senior undergrad taking courses that are available to first year grad students and ambitious senior undergraduate honors students. I have found this to be the best reference I own. It is highly readable for those with a biology background looking to learn more about cutting edge data, techniques and theories. It was required for an introductory graduate class in Molecular Biology-Genetic Mechanisms and Nucleic Acids. I have used for Biochemistry classes and as a great reference when reading scientific research papers for Cell Biology and other courses. I highly recommend this book. I am not a book seller or a book reviewer, just an interested student of biology.

I would recommend this book for those interested in upper level undergraduate or graduate level molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry. Some knowledge of biology is assumed, but as long as you have some introductory biology background, you should be able to get the most from this book.