The binding of the thick and heavy book is terrible. Many pages just fell apart about one month or so after I bought it. Also, I found there are some problems with its organization. For example, it is kind of confusing to describe both benzodiazepines and barbiturates together.

There are many good things to say about this text. It is through, has great cross-references, and is relatively cheap. Sadly, however, that is pretty much where the positive ends and the negative begins.

As has been said before, the orgainzation is pretty terrible. No one section fully covers all they want to say about a particular drug, and most medical schools present it in a different fashion. I spend half my time flipping around finding the relevant section about which I want to read.

Also, is it too much to ask that medical textbooks be properly bound? A flimsy paperback with cheap binding simply won't stand up to the rigors of lugging this book back and forth to class every day.

Not Recommended.

This text is required at my medical school. The text is dense and unapproachable, but that isn't my main complaint-the organization is TERRIBLE. One drug can be covered in multiple different chapters, but none of the chapters really have a great description! For example, B blockers are covered under "Autonomic Drugs", "Anti-Hypertensive Agents", and "Heart Failure Drugs"... just for starters! Anywhere you can use a B blocker, there's a separate discussion. Just give me ONE chapter on B blockers that actually talks about all of their uses!
If you do have to use this awful book, be advised that the first section of each chapter is a review of the pertinent physiology. If you need to go over this again to understand how the drugs will act, then use your favorite physio book, not Katzung.

I threw this book in a bonfire after I discovered Goodman. Painful to read. Manages to be short on detail and current developments (buy Goodman if you want either) and yet somehow wordy and full of information you don't need. Horribly edited. If you wan't something concise buy Lippencott's review (though the info is a bit dated).

The is a review of a pharmacy student. Unfortunately, this is a required text for my medchem/pharmacology class. You can ask any student in my class and majority of us would have the same complaint. This book is extremely difficult to follow. For example they give you a table for alpha and beta adrenergic receptors. While the table is more or less OK describing different beta receptor types, it doesn't tell much about alpha receptors. The authors of this omit a lot of important details. They don't write much about medications' side effects. In general this book makes it difficult to distinguish medications of each group from each other. On the better side, the book provides a lot of chemical structures, which make medchem part easier.