Garret/Grishaam's Biochemistry

My university uses this book for the two-semester biochem sequence for BSc Chemistry/Biochemistry students. It's a well-written book, overall -- lots of information but not a very dense "scientific" read. The best part is the way the authors keep tying things back to reality ... sidebars explain how the dynamics of protein folding affect Alzheimer's disease, or what protease inhibition means for the development of HIV drugs.

The figures are aesthetically pleasing and really help to clarify descriptions in the text. The only problem is that the figures are usually a couple pages away from the text they refer to. For example, when describing the mechanism of chymotrypsin cleavage, it would make a lot more sense to put all the text on the left page and the mechanism/structures on the right page. Instead, the text is about three pages before the mechanism, meaning the reader has to keep flipping back and forth trying to understand what is going on. It's like that in most if not all cases. Not a big deal, but it's the sort of thing the layout editor should have realized when putting the book together. Maybe they'll fix it in the fourth edition.