Customer Reviews

Principles of Biochemistry (3rd Edition)

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

 

 

Filled to the brim with useful, concise information, and helpful explanations. It also has very complete coverage of a broad variety of concepts and fields of study of biochemistry. While it can at times get bogged down in the details, it was extremely helpful to me during my biochemistry class, and inspired in me a desire to continue educating myself in the field. I am keeping this book rather than selling it, because I'm certain it will be of great use to me in my further studies in biology and medicine.

This is one of the most readable texts for biochemistry on the market. It would be most useful for undergraduates and medical students. It is almost useless for graduate students in the biological sciences because it doesn't talk enough about experimental strategies. The older version of this text was much cooler because it has stereoviews. This feature makes the book stand out because the stereoviews are awesome. Whose idea was it to remove them??? This would make a good first book in biochemistry, but for upper level students I would recommend Stryer.

I am a biochemistry professor. After years of using another text I decided to try the Voet & Voet text. I was very excited about their latest edition and couldn't wait to teach with it. Unfortunately it was a disaster. There are far too many trees in Voet & Voet, and students couldn't see the forest this year. For next year I am looking at "Principles of Biochemistry" 4th edition by Horton et al.

So, in response to V. Kankanala below, student perspectives in these Amazon Reviews are very useful to those of us assigning the texts.

This book was adopted by my university for a senior level / first year graduate level biochemistry course. It is well written and contains no messy jargon. Literally all of the text is useful information. In addition, it is concise.

My chief complaints about the book are: 1) the illustrations require substantial updating to be compared to what is presently available even in inferior texts. 2) it lacks clinical/biological correlations and focuses instead on the quantitative nature of biochemistry (acid base calculations etc) Clinical correlations are certainly essential to applying biochemistry concepts. If this book had either or both of these two items, it would have earned 5 stars from me!

Instead, I recommend the following texts:

- Biochemistry: outstanding illustrations and concept coverage.

- Marks' Basic Medical Biochemistry: A Clinical Approach: outstanding clinical correlations with concise concept coverage and good illustrations (although not in full color)

- Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition: outstanding text and illustrations!

For a beginning biochemistry text they make simple concepts overly complicated and wordy. Important concepts are not easily taken out of the text and they often refer to information in chapters that are much later in the text. The problems are the end of each chapter are extremely confusing and require you to do a search and find to figure out what tables you should refer to since the problem often does not tell you where you will find the information. Sometimes when a problem does refer to a table you go to look for the table and realize that they were all renumbered in the revised edition (though they forgot to change the table references in the problems). There are also numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Nothing about this text is straight forward or easy to understand.

In all my science courses this is probably the worst book I have ever encountered and have resorted to using other sources for learning most concepts as this book does not explain things clearly.

but I guess that happens when returning to complete ones higher education after 3 decades. The info IS understandable....the me to say that about ANY biochemistry resource is high praise.

OK...lets just get this out of the way: I didn't like this book. It has a lot of potential, but the chemistry part of it was a bore. It was hard to find what I was looking for, hard to follow, and it seemed like a lot of sections repeated themselves or just weren't clear. At least it can be had used for cheap...

I had to purchase the book because of the General Biochemistry course that I took at school. Although it is a well-written book, it does not provide the materials that are covered in our class. I do not even know why this book is required for an upper-division general biochemistry course! In other words, the book is very superficial and does not have enough substance.

Moreover, there are a lot of errors in the answer key section. You can pay slightly more and buy Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, but at least you would have something that you can learn from. I would not recommend this book.

It seems to be a good biochemistry textbook so far, but I am only two weeks into the semester. The illustrations fit well with what is in the text. Only complaint is the exercises and review at the end of the chapters could be a little better.

The book is decent. To be honest though, reviewing textbooks is kind of funny. Does it matter what I say? I suppose if you're ordering this book because you honestly just have a burning desire to learn about the principles of biochemistry, well... the more power to you. You'll learn it just fine from this book. If you're just buying the book because it's the required text for your college class (like I expect), well yeah, doesn't really matter what I say, does it?