Product Description

This book provides instructions on all the necessary skills for scuba diving. Diving history, boat diving procedures, the science of diving, planning and the environment, and scuba lifesaving are all covered. Buddy check procedures are also included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #453869 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Spencer Slate - National Chairman, YMCA Scuba Program
"An essential text for the scuba classroom."

Wayne P. Quarberg - Training Director - Multinational Diving Educators Association
"Superbly written. An excellent entry-level text that will also be of great use to the experienced and advanced diver."

Tom Hemphill - President of Emerald Seas International, Ltd. - Member, NAUI Board of Directors
"...covers all phases of recreational diving beyond the basics. It is an ideal text for beginning as well as advanced divers."

Customer Reviews

Excellent preparation for the PADI open water certification
I bought this book to prepare for the PADI open water certification. I found it to be a very well organized book that did an excellent job of explaining everything from the concepts of boyancy, diving physiology, to the dive tables. It will serve as a great resource the next time I plan to dive. The opening chapter discusses the the sensitivities of the underwater world and the importance of respecting this environment. I really appreciated this chapter after my first dive where I witnessed a group of reckless divers whom were basically out of control in the coral reef. I highly recommend this book to any beginning diver that wants to prepare for open water diver certification.

Good technical reference about scuba diving
About a month before I started studying the PADI Open Water manual (that you receive by post if you choose the fasttrack course), I bought a few books to get myself familiar with the concepts behind scuba diving.

First I chose "The Divers Handbook" from Alan Mountain, because it includes 50 pages dealing with coral, fish, and dangerous underwater creatures. Then I felt the need for something more technical and went for Dennis Graver's "Scuba Diving".

The book has a lot of background information illustrated with simple diagrams: the "Diving Science" section goes into the details of Guy-Lussac's law, Henry's law, partial pressures, and air consumption formulas.The "Dive Planning" section, while it uses USN tables (United States Navy) and not the RDP tables of the PADI course, includes dive planning problems and solutions and explains how to compute a letter group after repetitive dives.

You also find some interesting information about the physics behind waves, surf and currents in the "Diving Environment" section.

A very usefull book that allows you to go a little deeper into scuba diving theory than the PADI course does.

A good basic guide book
Since I didn't buy the thicker PADI Open Water guidebook during my course I grabbed this instead. It is a good solid book with some interesting emphasis on topics that are covered in less detail in the generic course book.

The only negative point I found was the manual isn't as comprehensive as the thicker course book we used and didn't provide me with some of the check-lists and other "important-to-remember" aspects I wanted to memorise before I got back into the water.

That said, if you want a book that will broaden your knowledge a bit or to use in conjunction with another course book then I think you will be more than happy with what this has to offer.