Hydroponics: Soilless Gardening Explained (ISBN 1861265603)

Excellent; consice but packed with information:
After reading 5 or 6 other books on hydroponics, this book is by far the best. It is packed with information, good drawings and pictures, and the results of ongoing research. It explains the different techniques used with hydroponics in enough detail that a beginner can make intelligent decisions about how to proceed. Excellent hands on information. It is filled with tidbits of info that add to your understanding of why things work best a certain way, without overwhelming you with extremely techincal explainations. I found that most books were too simplistic, or else textbooks, on the subject. The author did a good job of finding the middle ground.

A Good Source of Information:
This book is full of excellent information and should be the first one you purchase if you are interested in Hydroponics. It is well written and concise and shows enough detail to get its point across.

An inconsistent book:
This is a thin book which you can read in a weekend, and it does a decent job of introducing you to the topic. But it's not very consistent -- some topics are covered in depth, while others are not explained at all. For example, the last chapter uses the word "bolster" (as a noun) repeatedly, but never explains it, and fails to include it in the glossary as well. In addition, it has a focus on hydroponic growing in the UK -- listing only UK suppliers, and spending a lot of space discussing the particular issues of growing (outside) in the UK. It also spends many pages on what ought to be minor side-notes, like building a particular brand of commercial geodesic greenhouse, or building a system to maintain water level (a neat trick, but it could have been explained in a page or two). So I found it a useful book to start with, but it's not one I will keep on my shelf.