If you ever feel lost as to which book you should read for understanding a particular subject, chances are your fellow students will be of better help than teachers. Why? Simply because we have already tried several sources and will be able to give you a student-oriented view on which books works best (teachers specialize in their particular fields and they usually recommend books that are crowded with information that is redundant for students but necessary for specialists).
Note: Keep in mind what works for others may not work for you. Everyone has their own studying style. The books I recommend on my blog are what I and several of my colleagues found tremendously useful.
Note: Keep in mind what works for others may not work for you. Everyone has their own studying style. The books I recommend on my blog are what I and several of my colleagues found tremendously useful.
Forget Patrick Murray, Cedric Mims or whatever overly detailed book your microbiology teacher has recommended (unless you found it awesome in which case please write your recommendation in the comment section below so as other students may also benefit). After going through quite a few excessively elaborate books which you wouldn't need unless you were planning to be a microbiologist, here are the best ones we found:
1. Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple:
This book is a goldmine for us! Humor, mnemonics and student-friendly explanations, it made memorizing those horrifying critter names so much easier. (It goes into too much information for USMLE purposes but the mnemonics and tables were great for quick memorizing.)
2. The Big Picture: Medical Micobiology
It has great pictures and is perfect for clinical aspects of infections. It does not talk much about the organisms. BUT I have happened to very luckily stumble upon its appendix. If you were ever lost in microbiology like I was then you've just hit the jackpot! (And by lost I mean stumbling half-blind half-drunk into a dark crowded kingdom where critters walk headstrong and proud ready to eat out your cerebral cortex cell by cell if they see the tweensiest hint of surrender. I hope that painted a picture as to how lost I was in microbiology. Pharmacology has now taken its place. I will not only make a post but host a nation-wide party if I manage to find a pharmacology summary as awesome as this one.)
It's a great summary that you will regret not reading. When you are in the middle of your exams sweating, heart-racing, going through mind-block, you will thank whoever wrote that book (Neal Chamberlain) for that summary which gives you just the right hints and points to remember the tricky infesters.
It's a great summary that you will regret not reading. When you are in the middle of your exams sweating, heart-racing, going through mind-block, you will thank whoever wrote that book (Neal Chamberlain) for that summary which gives you just the right hints and points to remember the tricky infesters.
3. USMLE Step 1 Lecture Notes: Immunology and Microbiology by Kaplan
This is also a great book to sum things up once you come to revise. I used this book in my comprehensive end-of-pre-clinical phase exam for revising. What I did was this: I read the other 2 books above and added important notes that were missing in Kaplan where due. By the time I came to revising, it was easy peasy (not the memorizing but the studying process). Whilst everyone found difficulty in the microbiology questions (which had an entire exam booklet on its own), I breezed through them (and saved time on the laborious pharmacology questions. Yes laborious. I would rather have built a castle than answered those questions.)
On its own, this book is great for the USMLE but not so much for university exams.
On its own, this book is great for the USMLE but not so much for university exams.
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