(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best microbiology books

I would not recommend the Audubon guide it is very out of date (this can range from outdated taxonomy all the way to toxicology that has changed over the years). It is useful because it lists species other guides lacks but you'll learn to hate it.

Buy a location specific guide. It depends on where you live. If you get really into field hunting buy some specific guides that give you a more in depth understanding and help you not to die. Joining a local mycological society is also an extremely valuable resource in understanding mycology.

Here's a bit of everything

Regional guides

Alaska

Common Interior Alaska Cryptogams

Western US

All The Rain Promises and More
Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest

Mushrooms Demystified This is an old book, while still useful it definitely needs updating.

The New Savory Wild Mushroom Also dated but made for the PNW

Midwestern US

Mushrooms of the Midwest

Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois and Surrounding States

Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest

Southern US

Texas Mushrooms: A Field Guide

Mushrooms of the Southeastern United States

Common Mushrooms of Florida

A Field Guide to Southern Mushrooms It's old so you'll need to learn new names.

Eastern US

Mushrooms of West Virginia and the Central Appalachians

Mushrooms of Northeast North America (This was out of print for awhile but it's they're supposed to be reprinting so the price will be normal again)

Mushrooms of Northeastern North America

Macrofungi Associated with Oaks of Eastern North America(Macrofungi Associated with Oaks of Eastern North America)

Mushrooms of Cape Cod and the National Seashore

More specific (Advanced) guides

Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World

North American Boletes

Tricholomas of North America

Milk Mushrooms of North America

Waxcap Mushrooms of North America

Ascomycete of North America

Ascomycete in colour

Fungi of Switzerland: Vol. 1 Ascomycetes A series of 6 books.

Fungi Europaei A collection of 14 books.

PDFs and online Guides

For Pholiota

For Chlorophyllum

American species of Crepidotus

Guide to Australian Fungi If this is useful consider donating to this excellent set of guides.

Websites that aren't in the sidebar

For Amanita

For coprinoids

For Ascos

MycoQuebec: they have a kickass app but it's In French

Messiah college this has a lot of weird species for polypores and other things

For Hypomyces

Cultivation

The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home (If your home is a 50,000 sq ft warehouse)

Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation: Simple to Advanced and Experimental Techniques for Indoor and Outdoor Cultivation

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

Mycology

The fifth kingdom beginner book, I would recommend this. It goes over fungal taxonomy Oomycota, Zygomycota and Eumycota. It also has ecology and fungi as food.

The kingdom fungi coffee table book it has general taxonomy of the kingdom but also very nice pictures.

Introduction to fungi Depends on your definition of beginner, this is bio and orgo heavy. Remember the fungi you see pop out of the ground (ascos and basidios) are only a tiny fraction of the kingdom.

NAMA affiliated clubs

So I don't study ectomycorrhizal common networks like the subject of this radiolab, but I do study composition and functioning of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

If you can get your hands on this puppy, I would do so. It's not a sit down and read book, but it's definitely a great reference.

My current advisor wrote this, it's a little out of date in parts but it's worth reading, right now on amazon its a little pricey but I got my copy for 5 bucks.

The wiki is also a good start.

If you find some papers and can't get to them because of a paywall pm me.

I would take a look at this book. It's pretty good, but also can be a bit technical. It may push you.

I would also HIGHLY recommend listing to the This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcast. Very good and entertaining!

Yes, it is hard to get experience here in the UK as a student. It does bode well to ask for tours around labs if you can though and I think one of my friends did volunteer at our University over the summer between her second/third year.
Please do learn your aseptic technique and also remember the importance of lab health and safety too :D A very good book for microbiology laboratory techniques and the methods used to analyse various specimens is; Medical Microbiology (Fundamentals of Biomedical Science) editied by Michael Ford. Here is the link on the UK Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Medical-Microbiology-Fundamentals-Biomedical-Science/dp/019954963X .
I have just finished an undergraduate masters in Biomedical Science and did my training in microbiology (1 year in industry) and just got a job in a microbiology lab and this book helped me understand the tests the labs used, very useful.
Two things for when writing assignments/essays:

1. Remember to put all organism names in italics
   
2. Remember the Gram of Gram stain always should have a capital G
   Sorry if that comes across as obvious or anything, its just two things my lecturer always hated, moaned and dropped us marks for :D

I'm not aware of any textbook that contains all the subjects in one, and isn't test prep (question and answer format). That said, I only used ASCP's book (BOC Study Guide), which was not that helpful. These are probably too much information, but if she already knows enough about the clinical laboratory to navigate them, they may be helpful. Particularly if you can find cheap used ones a few editions old. These are the books I used for my clinical theory classes:

Hematology

Hematology Atlas

Clinical Chemistry

Clinical Microbiology

Parasitology

Blood Banking

She may also need one for Urinalysis & Body Fluids, though I have not used this one, just picked it from Amazon.

If nothing else the blood banking one is cheap! Good luck!

Our lab works with some of these guys!

Dating viruses can be done via sequence divergence measures or comparing modern host species. Lets say we have a virus that's in humans but not in chimp, orangutans, or gorillas, it's fairly safe to say it must be younger than our last common ancestor with those groups.

They inform our understanding of evolution in a lot of ways that haven't been fully taken advantage of yet. There have been studies where their effect on host gene transcription was measured that suggest they can contribute to species-specific patterns. They can force a speciation event if the portion of the population with the new virus is no longer able to reproduce with the population at large. They make major contributions to host genome diversity because they facilitate non-homologous recombination and chromosomal fusion and fission events in the host.

Here's some good reading on the web:

http://bioinformatics.cvr.ac.uk/paleovirology/index.html

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1024455415443

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=3814592&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract

My advisor always recommends this book to people, and I agree http://www.amazon.ca/Virolution-Frank-Ryan/dp/0007315120

Thanks for posting this. The blurry line between self and other has been fascinating me recently since I read a book called Welcome to the Microbiome which points out that not only is more of your body bacteria than human, but also the gene content of your body is something like 99.9% microbial, so if you take the perspective of the gene being the dominant structure we're much more accurately described as walking cities of microbes than as single complex organisms.

For those with the stomach, there is a video on Youtube of a biologist who incubated a botfly larvae in his hand. I won't link to it because frankly I don't want to see it again. :-)

I was hoping someone would mention Phages, they're something I personally think are going to be the next wave in anti-bacterial treatments. Currently reading a book on this exact topic, it's an exciting field of research that I really hope we have a lot of success with in the near future!

I'm not sure of your level of education but as a beginner I'd suggest going to university and studying microbiology. If that is not possible, reading a few relevant textbooks like Mims medical microbiology and The Human Microbiota and Microbiome will give you the basic knowledge required to spot wild or impossible claims such as getting arthritis from a probiotic. These are available for free digitally on websites I am unable to link to on reddit.

Beyond that, simply not commenting and not linking to unproven studies is a better option than doing so. It only muddies the water.

You should be a bit more cautious about your terms. Solution sets for linear DE's form linear spaces for which a basis may be available. Nonlinear DE's have solution spaces that are not vector spaces. However...

You are thinking in the direction of symmetry theory for differential equations (the concept analogous to isomorphisms in the nonlinear case are smooth changes of coordinates on the space of independent and dependent variables). There are few topics in all of mathematics more worthy of your time (I am somewhat biased). The goal of the early practitioners was indeed to transform a DE to a simple form and reduce the number of variables. Galois was interested in both algebraic equations and differential equations and envisioned extending Galois theory to the study of differential equations. (For a fairly technical look at this idea, see Galois' Dream by Michio Kuga.) The theory of Lie groups was developed by Sophus Lie in order to address exactly these questions.

Peter Hydon wrote a nice book on symmetry theory. Most other books on symmetry theory assume some familiarity with the machinery of differential geometry and Lie groups/Lie algebras, and so they can be more difficult to dive into.

I used this textbook for a college course: https://www.amazon.com/Microbiology-Technology-Fermented-Foods-Press/dp/0813800188

It doesn't go in depth about food safety though. Seemed like it was geared towards R&D. For pathogens, you're probably better off referencing a dense food micro book like this: https://www.amazon.com/James-M-Jay-Microbiology-seventh/dp/B008VS0QYS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549487393&sr=8-1&keywords=modern+food+microbiology+7th+edition

Yeah, lost my virology book in a big move and haven't had a chance to get a new one yet.

Janeway's actually covers most of the bases on host-pathogen interactions, but for the most part I don't work in that regime so I don't have much need for it. That said, yeah, a good virology text might come in handy, but even the one I had (Principles of Virology ) was easily the least used book on the shelf.

Welcome! TWiM is excellent.

For basic textbooks, I would suggest Microbe 2nd ed (TWiM's Michele Swanson is lead author; ASM link, Amazon link) or Brock's Biology of Microorganisms (Amazon link).

Please let me know if you have more questions!

Full disclosure: I work for ASM, but I would recommend Microbe 2nd ed even if I didn't.

If you're looking for a higher level but still intro book, John Wakeley's book Coalescent Theory is pretty good.

Yes, however not in the way we do today. Prior to the later half of the 19th century bread was made with what was called a sponge. In fact it was not until the late1850s through the work of Louis Pasteur that we even knew the mechanism by which yeast allowed bread to rise,. Throughout much of human history yeast has been created as a byproduct of fermentation, mainly the fermentation of beer, which dates back likely at least to ancient Mesopotamia. This is of course why many yeasts we purchase today are called Brewer’s Yeast as historically yeast was created through the craft of brewing. Beer brewing creates an excess of yeast, which when mixed with a small amount of flour, will create a frothy sponge- like mixture. This would then be kneaded with more flour and any other ingredients to create a standard bread, the staple food of European diets, and an important part of most other regions diets. Another method of rising bread was to use a small amount of a previously risen dough into a new batch to cause a rise. The earliest uses of yeast likely began with dough which was exposed to naturally occurring environmental yeast. This yeast could then be reused by adding bits of the dough to new batches. The first packaged yeast was available in the early 19th century, but did not enter common use until later that century. Both using a sponge created with the dregs of beer and one from previous doughs would have been common in 14th century Europe.


https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/yeast-making-food-great-for-5000-years-but-what-exactly-is-it/
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Yeast-Fungus-Shaped-Civilization/dp/0190270713
https://www.target.com/p/the-bread-bible-the-bread-bible-by-rose-levy-beranbaum-hardcover/-/A-11498148?ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=google_pla_df&fndsrc=tgtao&CPNG=PLA_Entertainment%2BShopping&adgroup=SC_Entertainment&LID=700000001170770pgs&network=g&device=m&location=9004778&gclsrc=aw.ds&ds_rl=1246978&ds_rl=1248099&ds_rl=1246978&gclid=CjwKCAiA_f3uBRAmEiwAzPuaMw9AUgT8hrRbiBt9PoIbz7vX6uRdp1Qd-O-uDiGzuu7ASLLgXe_RiBoCWysQAvD_BwE

What are you reading right now? I wish I could just pick one up and finish it but my brain isn't working.

Island on Fire, about volcanos and specifically the Laki disaster in the early 1700s in Iceland.

I Contain Multitudes, super wonderful look at our relationships with microbes.

Being Logical, a primer on symbolic logic.

I finished 5 books so far this year, my goal is 15 so I need to step it up a notch.

I found the Lippincott microcards really useful for getting a sense of organization and key points, and also as a general review/learning tool. They also include clinical scenarios which help hone in on some of the ways patients can present (our exams were heavily clinical case based). I also highly recommend micro made ridiculously simple, as was mentioned.

Here's a link here

Lippincott's Microcards, you can find them on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Lippincotts-Microcards-Microbiology-Harpavat-Edition/dp/145111219X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk.

do you have the TB for Brock Biology of Microorganisms 14th edition ?

https://www.amazon.com/Brock-Biology-Microorganisms-Michael-Madigan/dp/0321897390

ISBN-13: 978-0321897398
ISBN-10: 0321897390

I think you'd find this book interesting