ISBN0131453068

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?

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 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.

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!

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.