Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

usefull info	Customer Rating:
nice reference to look back on if you own an aquarium and want to keep it well maintained and keep your fish healthy.

Good information	Customer Rating:
I had read this book at our local library. The information was enough that I determined that I would need the information on a regular basis and should be a part of my library. I would recommend this book for anyone just starting their first aquarium.

Simple Guide to Freshwater Aquariums	Customer Rating:
This book was very easy to read and use. The index was consise and contained the major headings needed.

I threw it out.

Customer Rating:

This book does have some basic information--but that information is dangerously incomplete. The thing I disliked the most about it was that the author makes a great effort--over and over--to stress that the reader is a mere beginner and knows nothing compared to experts like himself. His condescending tone is both insulting and annoying. That wouldn't be so bad, if he then went on to educate us (the purpose, I foolishly assumed, for which this book was written). No such luck. In almost every section, we're told that we should leave the complex stuff to the experts. Case in point: He tells us the signs and symptoms of disease--but then refuses to tell us how to treat them. Instead, you're lectured that if you follow instructions you won't have any of those problems to begin with and that treating diseases is for experts. Uh...yeah. So, something does go wrong and one of your fish is being eaten alive by some parasite or fungus, you're supposed to just let it die rather than try to treat it. And then, I guess you're supposed to dump the entire tank and start over from scratch--though, of course, the book doesn't tell you how to rid an old tank and its contents of such nasties. And, where some sections lack important information, others are pedantic, so full of minute detail that makes this book inclusion in a series of books called "Simple Guides" laughable. It felt to me that the author simply likes to demonstrate his vast knowledge to what he hopes will be a suitably awed and humbled audience. I usually give away books I no longer want, but not this one. I've thrown three books in the trash my entire life. This was one of them.

Not structured enough

Customer Rating:

This book could be a good tool if it was organized a little bit. I found it difficult to locate the information I was looking for from the index. If you have the time to read it as you would a novel, you might find useful information. If, like me, you need a guide to setting up a fresh-water aquarium and some info on fish and plants, it is a little too scattered in various sections that didn't make much sense to me...