Sunday, February 12, 2012

Principles of Life PDF

Rating: (15 reviews) Author: David M. Hillis ISBN : 9781429257213 New from $34.99 Format: PDF
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For sample chapters, a video interview with David Hillis, and more information, visit www.whfreeman.com/hillispreview.

Sinauer Associates and W.H. Freeman are proud to introduce Principles of Life. Written in the spirit of the reform movement that is reinvigorating the introductory majors course, Principles of Life cuts through the thicket of excessive detail and factual minutiae to focus on what matters most in the study of biology today. Students explore the most essential biological ideas and information in the context of the field’s defining experiments, and are actively engaged in analyzing research data. The result is a textbook that is hundreds of pages shorter (and significantly less expensive) than the current majors introductory books.

Direct download links available for PRETITLE Principles of Life [Hardcover] POSTTITLE
  • Hardcover: 915 pages
  • Publisher: W. H. Freeman; First Edition edition (December 15, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1429257210
  • ISBN-13: 978-1429257213
  • Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 9.2 x 11 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 5.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Principles of Life PDF

Even though I'm not a biology major, I find myself enthralled by biological studies. And so when I enrolled in my biology course, I found out that my class would be using this book (Hillis' Principles of Life) rather than the Campbell Biology text, and I was rather surprised. I found this text to be excruciatingly inferior to the Campbell's, and the only mildly good aspect that I could think of would have to be the diagrams and pictures if one could be bothered to look at. The text itself are ridiculously brief, and do not explain very well about each topic matter.

I didn't purchase the actual book from Amazon, but rather I bought the access to Bioportal through the publisher's website, and it included the ebook with the Bioportal access. It is a horrible experience having to navigate through the pages trying to find the one paragraph to answer the question for the assignments (I ended up googling most of them to no avail due to the book's uselessness), and if you try to search using the find feature, you would still be stuck at square one!

The other biology classes at UT (which funny enough, is where Hillis is from) all use the Campbell text, but I chose my professor because I saw that people reviewed her as being a good teacher, but that is ruined by her insistence that we be the first class to try out this book. I had purchase the 3rd edition of Campbell's Biology (for a meager $10 at Half-Price) to make sure that I don't have to blunder my through this horrible book for the rest of the year.
By disatisfiedcollegestudent
I'm taking BSC 2010 at the University of Florida, and unfortunately, this textbook replaced the Campbell Biology textbook this year. I knew coming in that the course will be interesting, and fairly easy for me because I took AP Biology in High School and I still remember a fair number of the concepts. The one factor that I forgot to take into account is the possibility that we'd have a terrible textbook. There are a couple of reasons why this textbook is horrible for anyone who wants to learn about Biology; first, none of the concepts are explained very clearly. Second, the concepts aren't explained in enough detail. This forms the basis of a textbook that is too convoluted to actually be of any help for the BioPortal quizzes (which, if you're taking this course at UF, will be extremely annoying...trust me). Basically, it seems like the authors just wanted to throw together a Biology textbook for the heck of it, and see how much money they could make before people realized that there was a superior alternative (the Campbell textbook). I give this textbook 2 stars simply because it's about Biology.
By soccerplaya727

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