Handbook of Pediatric Surgery

This handbook covers a wide range of surgical conditions that affect newborns, infants, and children and reviews basic general information about their care.
There is an online version available, which is searchable.

The purpose is to review pediatric surgical conditions and provide the essential information needed for their initial evaluation and treatment as well the important aspects of the surgical treatment. The handbook is written by surgical residents and fellows and is intended for students and residents rotating on pediatric surgical services and for residents in pediatrics or surgery who need easy access to the essential information on these conditions and their treatment. This is a worthwhile objective. The most popular similar handbook is now eight years old. The online version is easy to access and adds the ability to search by topic or keyword.

It is intended for students and residents and is well organized and presented for this audience. It will be useful resource for this audience. The contributors are all surgical residents or fellows, or young surgeons in practice. Although not expert pediatric surgeons, the level of information presented and the intended audience make this choice of contributors reasonable.

The handbook provides a brief review of the common conditions in pediatric surgery. The chapters are concise and well organized. Most sections are organized with bullet lists, helpful illustrations, and reviews with pearls and pitfalls.

This handbook is appropriately brief and the presentation is high quality. The information is appropriate in depth and content for the intended audience of students and residents. The print version is more compact than Handbook of Pediatric Surgery, Sinha and Davenport (Springer, 2010). Given the interval between publication dates, there is updated information which makes this a worthwhile addition.

Weighted Numerical Score: 84 - 3 Stars