Wow, what an awful book. I agree with most of what has been written about this book. I'm a 1st semester nursing student with a background in English and I'm more than a little disgusted by Elsevier's resources so far. I thought the HESI review book was bad, and this book is equally bad. Not only does it have grammar and spelling errors, but there are more substantive errors, too, that really take their toll on your confidence (and patience) while you're reading. There is a ton of filler information so it is nearly impossible to sift and sort out what might be important for each chapter. We're also using an Assessment book by the author Jarvis, and it is way, way ahead of this book in terms of quality control.
And there are still errors in the answer key and the review questions are terribly written.
The latest error I found tonight has me shaking my head:
Page 1046, chapter 42 on Sleep:
Bedtime Snacks
"A dairy product snack such as warm milk or COCOA that contains L-tryptophan is often helpful in promoting sleep..."
Next paragraph: "Encourage clients not to drink or ingest caffeine before bed time. Coffee, tea, cola, and CHOCOLATE act as stimulants, causing a person to stay awake or awaken throughout the night."
Faculty, please please please think twice about adopting this book as part of your curriculum. Don't listen to the publisher's sales people. The online resources that accompany this book are EVEN WORSE, and are filled with mistakes. You'll spend so much time correcting mistakes from this series that you won't have time to teach Fundamentals.
All the tables and vignettes and pull-outs that go on for pages and pages interrupt my reading ... it's impossible to stay focused without being distracted with all the "stimuli" (for lack of a better word) going on on each page. Students don't read it (maybe 1 in 20 in my class read it) -- I did read it, and couldn't follow it and I have a BA in English. The writing isn't dense at all. It's just disorganized and lacks editing and focus, which makes it impossible to follow systematically. This book needs a complete overhaul -- there must be something better than this out there.
(Edit: I'm almost done with nursing school now, and my fundamentals skills continue to be a giant "gap" in my knowledge -- spent the last month reviewing an old LPN fundamentals book to learn basics because I learned nothing from this book, though I'm doing excellent with med surg class and clinicals and with the subsequent textbooks. This book is awful, no way around it. I wish I could count the number of times I've been embarrassed in clinicals because of something that is "Nursing 101" that I DIDN'T learn from this book.)