The author of this book, J. Benton Jones Jr, retired from the University of Georgia in 1989. Following his retirement he established a commercial laboratory for the analysis of plants, soils, water and agricultural materials. The first edition of this book was published in 1998. This second edition consists of 27 short chapters arranged in seven sections. It follows a conventional structure beginning with introductions to plant mineral nutrition and the physicochemical properties of soils. It then discusses the physiological roles of essential elements and lists elements toxic to plants. Methods to assess soil fertility and plant nutritional status, and ways to improve soil fertility are then considered. The sixth section describes soil-less production systems, and the text concludes with chapters on organic farming/gardening, weather and climatic conditions and best management practices. Often, the text is not written in prose, but in an idiosyncratic shorthand featuring lists of bulletpoints. It is written in the style of an expert, with few references to the literature. A total of 57 references are cited in the text and of these only 11 were published this millennium. The book contains a curious blend of metric and ‘British’ units, mixing metres and inches, hectares and acres, grams and ounces, and litres and gallons. Alarmingly, there is a mistake in the cover illustration. The symbol ‘Ci’, which (according to my Internet sources) is the symbol for the fictitious element cirilium found in hollow earth, should be ‘Cl’, the symbol for chlorine. Maybe one should not judge a book by its cover.