Microbiology the Easy Way

I am a nursing student and had to take Microbiology last semester. I was on a tight budget, so I took a chance and purchased this book instead of the recommended textbook. I studied my lecture notes and this book and made an A. The book is easy to understand and has pictures to help you understand certain concepts. The chapters are well organized and coincided with the chapters in the textook. Buy the book!

Its great to find a book that can give you the basics withuot having the word "dummy" in the title. A great resource for teachers and students alike.

This book is great. I have never taken microbiology and it breaks it down to where a first time reader understands everything.

I do NOT recommend what some others have here -- using this book as your sole source of information for a class without reading your textbook is not going to cut it. Your teacher teaches out of the textbook assigned to your class, so the information covered on your test will be from that specific textbook. This book, however is a fantastic supplement if you are having a hard time understanding what your textbook is saying on the difficult microbiological concepts. It raised my test scores by an entire letter grade on the very first test I took after purchasing it! Highly recommended, as well as Anatomy and Physiology The Easy Way.

If you have the aptitude to read full-strength science (the book is targeted at microbiology students), you will find this very affordable volume to be clear, complete, detailed, and well and richly illustrated. This book (which comes with a guarantee, right on the cover, that it will improve your grades in 30 days or you get your money back!) is thoughtfully organized and covers all the main areas of microbiology, from cellular chemistry to microbial metabolism to genetics to applied microbiology to how disease works to the immune system, and much else. Each of the 29 chapters concludes with review questions, a self-test, and detailed answers to the review questions. This book is serious about boosting your command of microbiology. The author and publisher have done everything in their power to improve your knowledge (and grades) short of sitting your exams for you. Each chapter is lavishly and clearly illustrated with blue-and-black drawings and diagrams. I'm looking at chapter 18, Nonspecific Defenses of the Host, about the nonspecific immune reponse. The drawings so far have been a closeup of the structure of the skin, with about 30 different types of tissue clearly labeled; a diagram of phagocytosis, or how a phagocyte ingests and digests an invading microbe; a diagram of margination and emigration, or how phagocytes can stick to the walls of blood vessels and roll along them till they find an intercellular crevice to squeeze through to get to infected tissue; a diagram of the fever response; and I see six more diagrams in the remainder of this chapter. They're all excellent--and that's just one chapter. This is not popular science, it's hard science. This text takes you right down to the brass tacks of how these things work, the specific chemical mechanisms involved. If you're not a student of this type of material already, then you do need to have a strong scientific aptitude (feel comfortable with chemistry and biological terms and processes) to read this book. It contains a tremendous amount of information. But in this world of genetic engineering, scary flu strains, and cloning, this is the kind of knowledge we should all have more of. I have rarely if ever found any book that I thought dealt with its material so completely, authoritatively, and clearly as this one does. And at this price it's an incredible deal. If I haven't made it clear, I'm delighted with this book. I will eagerly look for other Barron's books in this series (if any), in the hope that they're anywhere near as good.