Developmental Biology

I'm a biology graduate student with a physics background, so I bought this book to try to learn developmental bio. This seems to be the most prominent development textbook, and I can see why. I've been very pleased with it. It explains things very clearly and is written extremely well. The pictures are beautiful and well explained. The author includes some interesting science history, but not so much that it feels overwhelming or off-topic. It's clear that he's spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to present the material in order to teach it from scratch, assuming minimal prior biology knowledge. He doesn't go into the details of the Central Dogma and molecular biology because that's the realm of other textbooks, so it's good to know some of that to start with, but that can be learned easily from other sources. It also has a lot of great details for people who already have a pretty solid understanding of development, so this is a good book for anyone to have if they study development. Another great thing about this book is that it's very up-to-date. This edition came out in 2013, and it has a lot of citations to studies as late as 2011 and 2012. Biology changes fast and it's important to get an up-to-date textbook, and fortunately this book seems to get a new edition every few years. Overall, I highly recommend it.

This is a great textbook for developmental biology courses. Developmental biology, more than any other class I have taken as an upperclassman biology major, requires more use of diagrams and pictures. This book's drawings and corresponding explanations are fantastic. It helped that my professor used the book's figures extensively in lecture as well. Well worth the money. The book is very good at incorporating molecular biology lab techniques into each and every chapter. For this reason, my university now counts developmental biology as our "molecular biology" major requirement.

Very educational, then again what biology book isn't, love the book cover!

Extremely good. Great pictures, explanations, everything

There's a lot of background history, which I find less important, but it's pretty in-depth and easy to understand for me. Great pictures.

The book is detailed, but most of the details are in block paragraphs. Embryology is a subject where a picture is easily worth a thousand words. To put it bluntly, the book needs more detailed and labelled pictures, something akin to an anatomy atlas.

Good deal. Such book is a great decoration for your desk or room. Planes to read but end up with just puting it aside.

The book is self explanatory, sometimes easier than the teacher. Great amount of detail, step by step processes. Delivery on time.