A friend at the Minneapolis DiyBio meetup group suggested I read this book, and now I see why. This book fills very special niche within the current ecosystem of texts on genetics and biotechnology.
"The Biotechnology of Cannabis Sativa", which is a fancy way of saying "gene manipulation for pot farmers" is the first do-it-yourself biology book (that I have seen) aimed at an audience with no formal training in biology whatsoever. It is all about pot and in that respect stays true to its audience, but in the process it explains the fundamentals of genetic engineering on a small budget and gives a step-by-step method of doing just that with making glowing happy-flowers as a case study.
An example of why this is important: throughout my lab training in biochemistry, we frequently did a practice called gel electrophoresis. This essentially is injecting bits of dna into a porous (on the micro level) square that looks a lot like Jello, and then electrifying it. DNA naturally has a negative charge, so it will try to migrate to the positive terminal providing the electric shocks. Smaller DNA will move more rapidly than larger DNA, which gives the biochemist a tool to sort DNA by size. What exactly did sorting DNA by size have to do with creating a spider-goat? This was not explained to me in college.
Unlike the above example, BoCS does not introduce lab techniques until they are immediately relevant. By keeping to this flow, the reader always knows why a technique is valuable even before knowing the details of the technique itself. My only complaint is that I wish the book had gone in more detail on the cutting and joining of DNA, but it gives the reader the prerequisites to be able to research it themselves and that is enough.
Even though I had some formal training in this field, this book has helped greatly to strengthen the fundamentals and to help me more easily fit the other books I'm reading (and will read) into a useful framework of comprehension. In that regard it is very much like the personal MBA. I highly recommend this book to anyone, literally anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering (or biotechnology), what it is and how it's done.