Exploring Geology

I borrowed this from amazon for school this semester, and although I picked the slower shipping, it came the day after I ordered it. It certainly looks new, and I'm almost considering buying it. So far in class this book has been very useful. It's nothing like a regular textbook either! There are TONS of pictures, which you need for geology, and they set up the information very nicely.-The chapters are divided into sections, and each section is a 2 page spread, which is titled by either a header or a question, such as, "How Do Plates Move And Interact?", making it much easier to scroll through and find the information you're looking for.-Also, the text isn't in invisible size-it's pretty easy to read.-There are no long boring paragraphs that go on for miles. Instead there's smaller, 5 sentence paragraphs. The pictures and diagrams are well and concisely explained in this small paragraph form, so your specific homework question can not only be easily found, but also easily answered. They also took out a lot of unnecessary text. So if you're not going over it in class, it's not in the book. That helps when you have to reference the chapter.-My friend has an older edition, which has no glossary, so I assume that the glossary in this book is new.-There are also pictures and diagrams that you can observe before you read the lesson. Keep in mind, the pictures aren't on a different page, so you don't have to flip pages, find it, flip back, read, rinse and repeat. You can observe the picture, and as you read the small paragraphs, you can see what the text means. It's easy to find your place again too-just find the paragraph. In the introduction, they say that this "textbook contains more than 2,400 illustrations, which is 2 to 3 times the number in most intro to GEL textbooks".-There are also little blurbs about what's going on in real world geology, such as how the Mediterranean sea was once a dessert. Those are again concise, interesting, and go right into the lesson.-At the bottom right-hand corner of every 2 page-spread, there's a highlighted box containing questions, activities, and concepts you'll need to answer/ know before you leave the page. Those have been useful study guides for me.Also know that the authors researched a lot into how students today learn, and based the book off of that research. As a student, I actually enjoy this book, and reading the chapter is SO much easier than with any other textbook I've ever had. If you borrow or buy this textbook, or are thinking of getting an older edition, just know that this edition is a lot easier to use than others, and it's worth the extra money to have a less stressed semester.

The book itself has been a great read so far. While I've only had the book for an hour, I can tell you this is quite an impressive textbook. This book is meant to be viewed with dual page layouts. (2 pages viewed at once.)Unfortunately, "Kindle for PC" has no options to view this book as it was meant to be viewed, nor is it convenient to read this on an actual Kindle device. I suggest buying the hard copy, or renting, rather than the frustration of trying to use Kindle(anything) to read this book. I'll be returning this as soon as it's up for returning, and ordering a physical copy in it's place.

A few crumbled pages but great price of $8 compared to $80 and up at the book store

I really enjoyed this textbook. Gives a broad intro to geology and mechanisms of the earth. Simple writing, in depth explanations, diagrams, graphs, and awesome pictures really bring geology to life.

Covered all the topics we went over in class. Great resource.

It was not all that I was expecting because the book had some pages that were smeared by water. But besides that everything was fine.

Lots of detailed pictures, explanations and and I am overall impressed with this book for learning the science of geology.

The book was as expected however I did not need it for the course. It had great pictures and lots of good information.

At first glance I thought that this was going to be an easy and useful textbook, but I was dead wrong. The more I tried to read it the more I began to feel like it was made for someone with ADHD due to the organization (or lack thereof) of the pages and the lack of any useful information through the extensive use of images. I am all for a book with lots of pictures but this was overkill, and to give you an idea of the information that was on the pages consider any useless caption for a picture that you encounter in any book or website and apply those same qualities to all of the text in this book. As beautiful as the pictures are, reading this is not going to help me get a good mark in the course.

this class gives me nightmare still