Ebook: Applied Biophysics: A Molecular Approach for Physical Scientists

Having entered this field of research recently I was looking for standard literature in the field of Computational Biophysics and stumbled upon this book by Waigh.Well, in my judgement, it is mediocre as a textbook. The author is apparently a physicist that doesn't know much, if at all, of biophysics and biochemistry. This isn't necessarily bad for writing a textbook on Applied Biophysics, but the book doesn't keep its promise, because the author has no experience in biophysics really which you tell from the choice of chapters and the topics covered. Most likely he is a physicist that at some point entered the field of polymer or biophysics. The usual stuff: Crystallinity, self-Assembly, polymer dynamics, Scattering theory, diffusion, surfactants, rheology, electrostatics, capilarity, all the stuff that you can find in so many other textbooks and which he probably only had to copy and then maybe draw some new figures. This is a introductory first semester course in polymer physics. But as such, there are many better books on the field on the market, e.g. Polymer Physics by Rubinstein and Colby who offer much more detailed and knowledgable insight into these topics than Waigh. As an alibi, there is ONE chapter on DNA at the end of the book and one on membranes. But these cover extremly shallow only the very basics that you find in any introductury biology or molecular biology textbooks. Probably the author himself read such chapters in other books for the first time when he wrote his own book.The first chapter on proteins is extremely shallow, superficial and unspecific. No real theories are explained or expanded on, no computational models, not a single algorithm, nothing that goes into any detail or would be helpful for someone trying to start research in this field. This book strikes me as being written by someone who just wanted to write a book that "sounds" interesting by the title. In my opinion this book is completely superfluous, it doesn't cover any advanced topics, there is nothing new, just a conglomerate of basics which you can find in so many other books that have been already on the market for years. As a physicist, the author is also not an expert in this field. Very dissapointing. I don't recommend it and I regret having wasted my money. I rather invest my money now in trying to read original research papers in this field, particularly on simulation models, written by experts who really do research in this area and publish their own, original ideas.