Infection and immunity

John H.L. Playfair, Gregory J. Bancroft

Why I looked at this book

I'm interesting in genomics, and it is clear that a substantial part of our genome is concerned with our immune system. However, when I've read books on immunology which seemed to be aimed at a popular audience, it became clear that it would really help to have more thorough introduction to the subject. Hence I looked for an immunology textbook. I chose this one for several reasons. Firstly I didn't want to get out of my depth. Playfair has written several other books less technical than this one, so I can assume that this one won't assume knowledge the reader doesn't have. Also at around 350 pages it's not too long. The other thing I was looking for was a book with plenty of diagrams (I feel that a lot of 'popular' science books lose out from a lack of diagrams - possibly they don't want to look like textbooks), but in which the diagrams didn't interfere with the thread of the text, so that the book could be read through from beginning to end.

First impressions

The sample at Amazon is rather limited - you should look at Google preview for more, although I find that onscreen viewing is fairly limited for a textbook like this (I note that there's no Kindle version). The first part is about pathogens, the part that I'm interested in on immunity comes later, but what I've seen so far looks very good - the book manages to pack plenty of information into a short space. I particularly liked fig 1.4 - a map of the progress of an infection, which I guess could also serve as a map of the reader's progress through the book. Note that there is also online material relating to this book, including multiple choice questions.