What Your Fish Needs

A small book but it gets right to the point. Nice photos, not overly verbose. I inherited a 10 gallon aquarium with a hood & filter. Wanted to set it up for my son and knew the whole family would enjoy it. I don't want to study fish in depth (at least not at this point). I just wanted to know the basics - ie: what do I need to do and in what order. Nice feature of this book is that it has an example of how to stock a tropical community aquarium of various sizes. I went right the the list and was given 2 sets of fish to purchase and instructed how far apart to do this. After doing more reading, wondering how good this list really was, I discovered that a great deal of thought had gone into these examples. The first group of fish selected were known to be extremely hardy, resistant to higher levels of ammonia and varying ph. They are also nice small, non-agressive fish that are lively. The amount of reading and research required to select all these groupings for the various tank sizes is substantial and completely unnecessary as all the work has been done for you. If you want to learn more at a later date and make changes, additions, etc., additional reading references are included in the back of the book. You are told exactly what items you truly "need" to set up and maintain your first aquarium and you don't have to sift through pages and pages of information to get it. This is an invaluable book for folks who just want to get an aquarium up and running so that they can enjoy it.