What a delightful book. I didn't think so when it arrived and I, stupidly, opened it to some random topics and scratched my head wondering what the value of such sketchy descriptions might be. I then did what I should have done in the first place and read the book the way it's intended-from the beginning, indeed starting with the preface. I ended up reading it more than once. This is not a laboratory manual. It's not a set of protocols. It is far more useful than that. It is a clear and readable distillation of the logic underlying the ''mating scheme'', that wonderful tool of Drosophila genetics that lets us design and do experiments that one can't do with any other organism. For a student, or for any scientist, beginner or old hand, who wants to use Drosophila and who has been deprived of the joyful experience of an apprenticeship with Larry Sandler (or Mel Green, or Burke Judd, or Dan Lindsley, or Bill Baker, or any of the many other ''master fly pushers'', or their teachers or offspring), this book will remove the sense of arcane black magic that seems to be the first response of the Drosophila novice, no matter how well versed he or she may be in other areas of biology. If you want to actually do these kinds of experiments, and you haven't had the apprenticeship experience, you will probably want to pair it with the tomes that do give the details, but even if you just want to use a mutant that someone else has found, and mapped, and perhaps already cloned, this little book by itself will do wonders for your mental state. You'll know WHY the stock has all those weird chromosomes (and how to recognize the genotype you want), you'll know WHY you may want to look at more than one allele, you'll know WHY not every mutant recovered from a P