Rating: 
Summary: Best Book on Cell Biology at the Molecular Level!
Review: An excellent textbook with a very clear writing style. Includes excellent diagrams and photographs to illustrate the text. The best of the lot. Personally, I would put this book well ahead of the similar book by Bruce Alberts et al., for its clarity and bredth of coverage.
Rating: 
Summary: boring, tedious
Review: an extraordinarily boring description of an interesting field of science. often cursory to the point of idiocy at other times ridiculously dwelling on details of yeast genetics. the authors were obviously uninterested or unable to put the facts of recent research into perspective. the cd is a nice, though completely useless, gimmick. the figures are good, sadly their legends are beyond criticism.
Rating: 
Summary: Overwhelming Details
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fairly up to date and great teaching tool
Review: As you can imagine, no text book is a must read, but it certainly is a must own for any student of cell biology or biological scientists, from undergraduate, graduate, medical student, to the graduated faculty member. A useful text with great figures and an excellent accompanying CD.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent but starting to get outdated
Review: 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being now ~3 years old and due to the intense output and growth of scientific literature this book is starting to get outdated.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.
Rating:
Summary: Needs Improvement
Review: I agree with an earlier reviewer that the book is a good reference and the overwhelming details contained in it make it difficult to get the basic fundamentals. The authors need to trim it down and focus more on fundamental principles. I feel at times the book is somewhat convoluted and hard to follow. This is sometimes the case with books that have multiple authors.
Another reviewer pointed out the over abundance of yeast molecular biology contained in he book. I again agree with this person. I realize yeast is where we learned a lot about eukaryotic molecular biology. But I wish the book focused less on yeast and more mammalian cell biology. People using this book are likely to be looking at careers in biomedical research or medicine. I think more mammalian biology would be more beneficial.Why do all these textbooks have to have a CD to run the price of the book up ?
Rating:
Summary: Best volume I've yet found for a tough subject
Review: I am an attorney but have a science background. I've recently decided to learn biotechnology as a personal interest. This book is well written and illustrated. It really covers the material without dumbing down and without loosing the reader as many books do. I found I could successgfully teach myself with this volume.
Rating: 
Summary: Worldview
Review: I am part way through the text at this point. It does offer a reasonably clear presentation of material. The author proffers a Darwinian (in the strong sense) world view which is stated repeatedly as fact with no substantive argument or scientific evidence. The CD is a nice addition but limited.
Rating:
Summary: This is just the one I've starved for
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I recommend that book
Review: I bought the german edition of the book. In my opinion it's one of the best covering this extensive topic. What I miss is the CD-ROM. Unfortunately it is not included in the german edition. On the corresponding web-site I found some of the animations which come with the CD-ROM. Compared to other web-based "molecular biology" animations and movie-material these animations are really very good and can be helpful especially for teaching purposes. As the CD-ROM is not available without the book and the movies and animations are not free for download it looks as I will have to buy the original edition too.
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