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Molecular Biology of the Cell 3E

Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, James D. Watson · 2 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Molecular Biology of the Cell 3E" by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, James D. Watson.
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Amazon Summary
"The epitome of what a current upper level textbook in cell biology should be". -- Quarterly Review of Biology"Accessible and relatively easy to read....timely and accurate.... profusely and beautifully illustrated". -- American Society for Microbiology News"A reliable, accurate and up-to-date textbook for which students and researchers must be grateful". -- Trends in Biochemical Sciences"The standard against which other scientific textbooks will be measured". -- Biochemical Education Now generously illustrated in full color and featuring many new panels, drawings, and diagrams, the Third Edition is completely reorganized to reflect new discoveries, new emphases, and new approaches. It covers major advances in signal transduction, intracellular protein sorting, gene regulation, control of cell division, and developmental biology. The biology of plants and the nervous system are integrated into the main text. The Third Edition also extensively updates coverage of immunology and cancer, and adds two new chapters that examine recombinant DNA techniques and proteins as machines.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
> His biology stuff, for instance, is decidedly worse than the mathematics.

I dunno.

I've been studying cell biology on my spare time. I've been using The Molecular Biology of the Cell (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/d...) that in my opinion is a great book, and as far as I know, is well-respected in general.

Still, watching Sal's biology videos has been of great help. Although I think e.g. his organic chemistry videos are better executed (~10 minutes per video, a bit less packed, better splits by content), I still think that his biology videos are a super-valuable resource. I've been watching some MIT lectures too, but visualizations, which are necessary for biology, aren't properly visible in them. Of the free biology content in the web, Sal's videos are the best IMO.

When I started out in a systems biology lab with a physics and CS background but no biology, they gave me this book:

Molecular Biology of the Cell http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Alberts-Al/dp/0...

The description of the DNA --> RNA --> protein pipeline was really satisfying to someone with my background, full of codes, error-correction algorithms, and rate-limiting steps. I think of it as the Numerical Recipes of biology.

lliiffee
Is there a reason you linked to the 3rd edition? Oddly, James Watson is no longer listed as an author in the 4th edition, and a bunch of other people are added.
lukego
Alan Kay frequently recommends that book too.
jballanc
Alberts is very often held as the "standard text" (much like Grey's in Anatomy, Atkins in Physical Chemistry, or SICP). I would also recommend "Molecular Genetics of Bacteria" by Snyder and Champness (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Genetics-Bacteria-Snyder/dp/...). As you'd expect, it's very focused on Bacteria, but it's current and goes all the way from the basic to the very in-depth.

Edit: Oh! And how could I forget Lodish (http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Cell-Biology-Harvey-Lodish/d...)? Also very good...

Agathos
Heh. "standard text"

So anyway, the journal asks why I'm citing Alberts so much and I write back, "Alberts is the standard text, editor."

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