This review got to be rather longer than usual, but I guess I don't have a hard time justifying that on account of the nature of the book.
To get thisThis review got to be rather longer than usual, but I guess I don't have a hard time justifying that on account of the nature of the book.
To get this over with from the beginning: If you have never read a medical textbook before, don't bother with this one. You'll learn nothing and you'll never finish it. Unless you speak more or less fluent medical textbook you'll have to either look up a lot of new words, or you'll read a lot of words you'll not understand. The fact that the book is somewhat inaccessible was the most important factor pulling me towards 4 stars. I decided to let it have 5 stars anyway in the end - given how many hours I was willing to spend on this stuff I really couldn't justify giving it any other rating, although there are also a few other small problems which I might have punished in other contexts.
If you know enough to benefit from reading this book it's a great book, even though I'd prefer if future doctors - which would presumably make up most of the potential readers who 'know enough to benefit from reading it' - read a newer version of it. But in order to read it and get something out of it, you need some basic knowledge about stuff like microbiology, histology, immunology, endocrinology, oncology, (/bio-)chemistry, genetics, pharmacology, etc. And I don't mean basic knowledge like what you'd get from a couple of wikipedia articles - having read textbooks and/or watched medical lectures on some of these topics is a must.
On top of relevant background knowledge you need to be willing to commit at the very least something like 50 hours of spare time to reading this thing. I spent significantly more time than that, and most people probably need to do that as well if they want to actually understand most of this stuff - you certainly do if you want some of it to actually stick.
There probably exist quite a few similar medical textbooks which are more up to date and which may provide slightly better coverage. But I'm not going to read those books. I read this one. And I'm glad I did. Don't interpret the 5 stars to mean that this is the best book on this topic - I have no way of knowing whether or not it is, though I assume it isn't. But it is a highly informative and well-written book which covers a lot of ground and from which I learned a lot....more
The first half of the book was not easy to read due to the technical nature of the coverage, and so I decided to put it away for a while. However I diThe first half of the book was not easy to read due to the technical nature of the coverage, and so I decided to put it away for a while. However I did pick it up again, and I'm really glad I did as there's simply no way around the fact that this book is awesome. Some of the chapters in this book are chapters you need to read.
Highly recommended. Probably the best book I've read this year....more
Many people will benefit more from reading this book than I did, as I found it occasionally to be a bit 'too basic' for my taste. However the book isMany people will benefit more from reading this book than I did, as I found it occasionally to be a bit 'too basic' for my taste. However the book is so well written that I cannot possibly justify giving it any other rating than 5 stars. This is a really nice book on how to think about diagnostics and how to use data in this area to inform decision-making....more
Presumably the five star rating is in part due to the amount of work it took to complete the book - in the sense that I probably felt a need to justifPresumably the five star rating is in part due to the amount of work it took to complete the book - in the sense that I probably felt a need to justify having read this book due to the amount of time it took, and if I could convince myself that the book was good this would be an easier thing to do. On the other hand I did make a decision reasonably early on that if I did decide to eventually rate this book, I'd most likely have to give it five stars; the only plausible alternative to giving the book five stars was not rating the book at all - I could never have justified giving this book a low rating even if I'd found myself unable to finish chapter 7, as this would have implied implicitly punishing the authors for basically providing quite exhaustive coverage of the topic(s) at hand.
Some of the content, especially in the later chapters of the book, is quite difficult, especially if you're not willing to spend quite a bit of time on it, but many key ideas are developed and explained in a manner that makes them relatively easy to understand if you have the proper background. A lot of the stuff in this book is stuff it would be easy to argue that people working in the applied sciences ought to know, and it would also not be hard to argue that some of these things (especially the ideas developed in the first few chapters) should likewise be known by non-scientists who would like to hold opinions about science and scientific research.
The book was written some years ago, so some progress has presumably been made in the meantime especially when it comes to concrete applications (due to computing power developments since the book was written - this is probably especially relevant in the context of the application of numerical methods and how to apply the bootstrap) in specific contexts which were not well-explored at the time of the publication of the book. However most of the main points of the book are based on deep theory from information theory and mathematical statistics, so the publication date should not in my mind be considered a strong argument against exploring the ideas presented in this book.
In my opinion this is one of Pratchett's best books - wonderful and amazing are two words that immediately spring to mind. However it should not be thIn my opinion this is one of Pratchett's best books - wonderful and amazing are two words that immediately spring to mind. However it should not be the first Discworld book you read; this story is really powerful if you're familiar with the setting (Ankh-Morpork, the City Watch), but if you're not I think it'll be easy to miss out on a lot of details. You should probably at the very least have read one or two of the other books in the City Watch series before reading this one....more
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