# Good Books to Read



## Akinaura (Nov 8, 2010)

Hello everyone!

While I am not new to the hobby, having had multiple tanks for several years now, the question I have for everyone would definitely benefit those coming into the hobby so that is why I am posting it here.

My question is: What books would you recommend for someone trying to learn more information about the hobby? And not just about fish-keeping, or planted tanks, or about the nitrogen cycle...but where to learn about lighting, about common (or even uncommon) tank emergencies, about some of the smaller aspects of keeping a tank.

Thank you in advance for any and all books that everyone recommends. I will enjoy reading everything, and I'm sure that newcomers to the hobby will appreciate it as well.


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## navigator black (Jan 3, 2012)

The standard format of any aquarium book is to begin with equipment and set up, then go to the cycle, then to other maintenance, disease and parasite recognition, and finally fish. They are really the same in the first half of the text.
Pretty well any decent book will cover the basics well - it is almost a cliche. For tank emergencies, it gets harder. I'm a reader and sometime aquarium writer, so I keep track of the market - I know of no source other than the 'aquarium vet' books that deal with diseases. They can edge on assuming you have a mini-lab in your bedroom closet. They are very useful, but dry.

There's a really old book, Innes' "Exotic Aquarium Fishes" that I swear by because it is 1940s-1950s low tech - no cycle, no power filtration and from an era when aquarists had to fly by the seat of their pants for problem solving. It's actually really useful for that - dated as could be but ingenious.
The real source for individual tank crisis info has been the magazines - TFH and Aquarium Fish in North America. I have always found great stuff in them. 

Aquarium book production has slowed right down. Barrons' had a good beginner series up to about 5 years ago, and that's the last I've seen other than advanced aquariist/specialist books since. We can cherry pick online and it seems most aquarists don't like reading. I think when the e-readers begin to have standard colour, books with photos will rebound and we might see a new wave of aquarium books. I hope so. 
Books help pressure the chain stores to actually provide consumers with choice. The tendency now is for the chains to narrow down to a tiny selection and offer it in all of their outlets as if there were nothing else, and a lot of beautiful and interesting little fish are no longer being sold. Non reading aquarists don't even know they exist, since Pet-This and Pet-That don't stock them, and the hobby narrows and becomes less educational (and more profitable).


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## HFGGHG (Aug 28, 2011)

When I first got into the hobby, last summer, I bought the following book:

*Freshwater Aquariums For Dummies, 2nd Edition
by Maddy Hargrove, Mic Hargrove 
*
Easy and quick to read, basic but thorough advice, fish descriptions including recommended water temps for the particular fish, diseases, equipment, fun Top 10 lists, etc etc.

I got a good understanding of the Nitrogen Cycle with
comprehensible meanings of nitrites, nitrates and ammonia.

A good first book that I still refer back to.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

biology and botany textbooks. college level.


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## navigator black (Jan 3, 2012)

I was driving around yesterday, and got thinking about the original question here. Tank malfunctions, disasters and good old fashioned troubleshooting are rarely going to be in a book. They are unpredictable problems - they are what forums and web-sites are best for. You need to converse for those, either with people face to face at a club or on a forum.

General knowledge is what can be organized and presented in good books and articles. On one level, we have far too many aquarists who won't read a book on the art of fishkeeping, and who jam oscars into 40 gallon tanks and wonder why things go wrong. In may be impolite to say, but there is a willful ignorance in fishkeeping as in all other things. Learning takes a little effort
.
On the other, we have people using textbooks. I'm addicted to internet pdf files - scientific descriptions - to get key info on fish. But we need the in-between. A botany or biology textbook can be good. Travel books can be good too - find out where a fish is from, and start exploring. Understanding habitat is close to everything, and I have learned a lot about my killies by reading travel articles. Google Earth is a great resource.

Group specific books are great. We may have a shortage of new general info books, but specific books on keeping catfish, West African Cichlids (Anton Lamboj), Geophagus (Thomas Weidner), G Allan or Adrian Tappin's books on rainbows, books on Gouramis, livebearers, Killies, all sorts of cichlids - they are all good reads. Every aquarist should own the Baensch Atlases.

If you have dough, Oliver Lucanus's Amazon below Water is a coffee table book of underwater photos from the Amazon - it is beautiful and incredibly informative. Those images say as much as many pages, if you look closely. 

The book trade is hanging on, and there is good stuff for the digging.


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## Auban (Aug 8, 2010)

i think its like anything else. if you dig deep enough into a hobby, you will HAVE to reach outside the hobby. take for instance breeders barracks. if you want to design a good barracks system, you need to look up how to build it. 

how about lighting? if i want that perfect light set up for my plants, i may just have to move over to a gardening forum where people are starting there plants indoors and take a note about what they use.

i myself have been looking for a good book on ecology. to date, i have not found one that answers the questions i have. i want to know how everything i might put in a tank competes for and uses the resources it has at hand. and how they recycle it. 

this kind of information is imperative for the type of system i want to produce some day. 
nothing seems to address how entropy progresses in a closed system...


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