This is one of the first five books that I bought through amazon.com . I got a $50 gift certificate from my cousin for Christmas (Thanks, Michele) and bought a few things I thought might be interesting. Cat's Cradle was the first book I read from these.
About a 100 pages of text plus a glossary and some pretty handy diagrams and tables. This is written on about the eighth grade level (I'm guessing) and is a little pedantic and obtuse in its explanations, but I prefer explanations that actually do explain things - to the point of boredom, if necessary - to explanations that don't actually explain anything. Overdone is better than underdone.
This book is a worthwhile starting point for the subject, I suppose. I was a little bit annoyed that it hinted at a few things and then didn't get around to explaining them until later. For example, the language explaining Watson's relationship to the project early on was a little ambiguous and I had determined to look a few things up on completing the book only to find out that she addressed the point near the end of the book. Also it was a little too much like a cheerleader rooting for the hometeam.
There's a diagram of which amino acids the various nucleotide triplets code to which is kinda handy. And the examples of methodology (though necessarily vague and incomplete) were sufficient to get the ideas across. The glossary is handy as well, and there's also a reading list at the end of the book. It took me about six hours to read it (though I was watching my kids play while that was going on, so a concentrated effort should require maybe two or three).
Addendum: 10/5/98
I'm looking forward to reading a more in-depth book on the subject. In the meantime, the Human Genome Project has a great primer on the subject of Molecular Genetics.
Soon after I read this book my friend Jeremy told me of a movie called "GATTACA" that I ought to see. I finally watched it last night. It was very good. Jeremy noted that the letters of the movie's title are all letters for the nucleotide bases. I'm wondering (and perhaps he wondered, as well) whether GATTACA has any greater significance. The length of the sequence is not a multiple of three, and it takes three nucleotides to code for an amino acid. So, there's two amino acids here, assuming it starts with one, GAT (aspartic acid), and TAC (tyrosine), with an extra 'A' dangling at the end. This sequence is short enough that it probably exists in the coding for every human protein. Or maybe it starts a very specific protein. Not enough info, yet. In any case, the movie does criticizes the possible (and even likely) abuses of this kind of knowledge. ('This kind of knowledge' being a detailed understanding of the human genome.)
