[.ca] The Discus: An Owner's Guide toa Happy Healthy Fish (ISBN 1582451125)

Just the basics:
This is a great book if you know next to nothing about discus. It gives you all the specs you may need to know to keep healthy beautiful discus and even the basics on breeding with some nice pictures. It also repeats alot of information for reference purposes. However, if you need a detailed discription of the care of discus you will be diapointed with this one. I recomend you purchase it with another more detailed book that may overlook the more simple aspects of discus care.

Just as it Says:
This book is, as it implies for the beginning discus keeper. I will go as far as to say that this book isn't only for beginning discus keepers, but for stark new aquarium keepers of any fish. There are only a few chapters that are related directly to discus fish, and of these most of the information is VERY general insomuch that it only relates to GENERAL fishkeeping. If you are NEW to the hobby I would recommend this book, but if you are experianced at all find another, more in depth study of the discus:)

Absolutely Terrible:
This book is a complete waste of money. I'd give it a negative number of stars if I could. What's so bad about it then? It is simply a beginners guide to aquarium keeping (and not a very good one at that) with a few mentions of discus thrown in to make it sound as if it is a discus book. The photographs are OK as far as photography goes, but most of the fish pictured are poor specimens including the malformed discus pictured on the cover. Many of the photos are re-used in different parts of the book, occasionally in reverse as if there was an attempt to disguise the fact that the pictures were being re-used. The captions have nothing to do with the photos. There is a picture of a fish with holes in it's head and another of a fish with early stages of fin rot, but neither of these pictures are used in the section on diseases and the captions do not point out these defects. There is no identification of the strains being pictured and virtually no photos of wild specimens to help in identifying the 2 species and 5 subspecies that are briefly described in the text. There is a section on the history of the discus, but important names such as Jack Wattley, Carrol Friswold, and Gene Wolfsheimer are conspicuous by their absence. A lot of the information is redundant and contradictory. For example on page 39 we find "One way to estimate which size heater your aquarium will need is to allow 5 watts per gallon. For example, a 55-gallon aquarium would need a heater that is at least 275 watts". Meanwhile, on page 54 we read "A heater should supply 2 watts per gallon. So, a 55-gallon aquarium would need at least a 110-watt heater". Now which do think the authors would have you use? Of course they also don't mention that nobody actually manufactures heaters of those wattages (they can readily be found in 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 200, 250 and 300 watts). On the whole, this is one of those books that seems to regurgitate a bunch of stuff that has become "standard knowledge" in the aquarium hobby, without really knowing why these things have become so (or the science behind it). On page 80 in a side box on bare tank set-ups, we are admonished that these are "less cozy for your fish", whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that "coziness" is anything we can measure or the fish can give us feedback on in the same way that they behave if their water is too warm. On page 47 there is an extremely poor and misleading diagram of the nitrogen cyle. It implies that the major source of ammonia in the aquarium is the fungal and bacterial decomposition of fish "wastes" (feces?). The major source of ammonia is: it is directly exhaled into the water from fishes gills. There is also no mention of the relationship of pH to ammonia ionization, which is critical to be aware of in the low pH of a discus tank, particularly with regards to water changes and the usually accompanying rise in pH. There are a lot of other points I could raise, but time constraints prevent me. In summary, this book is a complete waste of money. Just about any book would be better, but if price is a concern the T. Giovanetti book is far better in this price range. I haven't seen M. Sweeney's discus book, but I have seen other things she has written and although I don't really care for her, even her book has got to be better than this one. Even better, spend a little extra and get something by B. Degen, J. Wattley, or J. Quarles. With the price of discus being what it is, if you can afford to keep them, you can afford one of the better books.

A good book really for a beginner:
I saw this book when i went to the internet to do research on some information about keeping discus.At that time i was planning to own one but have no experience with discus and know very little about tropical fish which i thought only need air supply to survive.Many people on the net said this book was good and is very useful when it comes to problems with the discus so i went to buy it.I learnt many new things about it like heaters,different filtrations,UV lights,tank water like pH,ammonia,hardness and nitrites and nitrates.It was really useful even in the diseases section where they tell us how to deal with sickness of the fish.But overall it was really not that good as it did not go into detail about chillers and heaters and also some websites it listed at the back of the book have already closed. These are some bad points so i only gave 3 stars but it is really worth buying for a beginner.

A good beginner's first book!:
This book is another good intro guide or first book for beginners getting into Discus keeping. It outlines all the basic requirments for keeping the fish healthy. Although this book covers lots of topics, but I find some of them lack the necessary depth to be helpful to seasoned hobbyist (ie. breeding, raising the young). If your looking to buy a second Discus book, try "Degen Discus Book" by Degen. Overall 4 Stars because as a intro book it cost too much compare to others. "Discus Fish" by Thomas A. Giovanetti has the same info, if not more, and it costs much less!