[DIYbio] Re: The best books for a begginer

Hi Ulisses, welcome to the group! Genetics is a broad field and how you study depends on what you are doing.

To start, I would recommend a general genetics textbook  but also there is a lot free online, for example this MIT Open Courseware course.

From there it depends on what you want to do and study. 

If you are interested in statistical or population genetics you should start with Population Genetics, A Concise Guide by John Gillespie. For other popular science books on population genetics Darwin's classic Origin of Species is a good prequel and then books by Fisher (Genetical Theory of Natural Selection) and Haldane (Causes of Evolution) and some of Sewall Wright's stuff. Once you are ready to get hardcore, it can depend on how comfortable you are with math since a lot of population genetics texts (Crow & Kimura, Kempthorne, even Speiss) can be math heavy. 

If you deal with quantitative genetics/breeding in animals etc. (and know lab ethics and protocols) Falconer & Mackay is one of the good starters though people have to be careful with using quantitative genetics and not be sloppy. The math and concepts appear easy and straightforward to apply but the underlying concepts are very subtle. Inbreeding, gene x environment vs. interaction, relative correlations, selection response, heritability, trait regression, etc. all get misinterpreted and misused all the time, even in scientific journals. Bruce Walsh has good online lectures on quantitative genetics too.

If you are interested in genetic engineering and labwork, a book on PCR and Electrophoresis (second hand) are a must and there are also a lot of Web resources on these as well. You probably want a book on the genetics of bacteria (Snyder et. al.  is good) since bacteria and their plasmids as well as bacteriophage viruses are common and even CRISPR has a bacterial origin.

If you want to research stuff in your local area, there are books on conservation genetics which you can contribute to just using a PCR and Sanger sequencing. I am working on a local invasive species here in PA, the spotted lanternfly.

Let me know if this helps.

Reggie