The Physiology of Excitable Cells (3rd Edition)

This book does not give core facts in a easy to regurgitate format.Don't read this a day before your exam.

What the book gives you and does better than any other neurobiology book I know about (yes,that's a tall claim, but Im comfortable making it) is a clear and concise walk through the relevant ideas and experiments that went into building a simple 'taken for granted' concept like say the synaptic vesicles.

This book more than any other made me see the facts I read in tons of other books through the eye of an experimentalist and I had a clear appreciation of the thought that went towards designing an experiment and interpreting the result.I'm not sure if this would be the best book to read for an introduction to Neurobiology but if you have some background this is a book you would like to come back to again and again.


Poorly written and hard to follow.   October 31, 2000
 7 out of 8 found this review helpful

I am a first year graduate student in Neurobiology, and our class was assigned Aidley as our text for Neurophysiology. In short: this class has now become much more difficult because of Aidley's hard to follow style. He gives numerous details of experiments, but wholly fails to connect them to each other or to the reader. In addition, the numerous charts and graphs lend little support to the text since most often they are poorly explained and have little to do with the section in which they are placed. Each chapter follows a logical sequence, but the text within does not, jumping from descriptions of genetics experimental methods straight to physical chemistry. If you want to learn about Neurophysiology, there are many other texts to choose from, most of which the reader would find more interesting and more well written.


Aidley - Interesting and user friendly (mostly)   September 6, 2000
 4 out of 5 found this review helpful

As part of my degree I study neuromuscular physiology and this is the recomended text.It has well layed out chapters with each unit taking a major topic in electrophysiology. It starts with the extreme basic but this gives you the instant reminder of all that you've learned and the basis of electrophysiology. The chapters are layed out in the topics generally study at university, though it goes into more detail. The graphs that accompany many of the topics were found very useful for comparison for practical experiments. This text is helpful and detailed, and useful for study.