Practical cardiology (+ CD ROM). 2nd ed. Tracey Baker, George Nikolic, Simon O’Connor. Sydney: Churchill Livingstone, 2008 (xxiii + 391 pp). ISBN 9780729538411.

The first edition of Practical cardiology: an approach to the management of problems in cardiology, by Baker and O’Connor, appeared in 1999. This second edition includes a third author, George Nikolic. Baker is a Canberra general practitioner, while Nikolic and O’Connor are cardiologists at the Canberra Hospital.

Larger than the first edition (391 pages versus 192), and including a supplementary CD of angiographic and echocardiographic video images, it is excellent value at $89.95. It is likely to be useful for GPs and their trainees, medical students and cardiac nurses, and could be read with profit by those training in general medicine or beginning advanced training in cardiology.

The sections on case- or problem-based learning are practical, well done and worthwhile exercises for senior medical students and trainee physicians. There is a helpful chapter on clinical trials, although there is no mention of some of the important earlier studies (GISSI, ISIS, GUSTO, LATE, etc). There are useful sections on electrocardiography, arrhythmias, heart disease and non-cardiac surgery, coronary revascularisation, antiplatelet therapy, anticoagulants, heart disease in pregnancy and congenital heart disease.

My primary concerns relate to the illustrations. Some of these have been reproduced poorly, so that, for example, the demonstration of rib notching in a chest radiograph of a patient with coarctation of the aorta is unconvincing, as are the illustrations of Kerley B lines and valve calcification. Some images of echocardiograms need more comprehensive labelling. The CD images are a worthwhile addition, but their value would also be enhanced by explanatory labels, diagrams or cartoons: intravascular or transoesophageal studies are unlikely to mean much to the uninitiated without such help.

This book retains the attractive features of the first edition, in that it is concise, simple, authoritative and as up to date as we might expect of any publication when it deals with so rapidly changing a field as cardiology.