The last edition of Tietz's Fundamentals of Clinical Chemistry appeared more than ten years ago and survives as a dated but valuable reference. The successor to Fundamentals, Textbook of Clinical Chemistry, follows an outline similar to the original text but adds many new subjects and updates older topics. This has resulted in a text that is 50% larger than its predecessor.
Much of the newer material centers on interpretation and understanding of data and its limitations. For example, more than 200 pages (compared with 50 pages) are dedicated to an introductory section entitled "Acquisition, Management, and Application of Laboratory Data," covering the use of reference ranges, statistics, quality assurance, method evaluation, and computers. The remaining introductory chapters discuss general procedures, instrumentation, and automation. Unfortunately, the chapter that discusses current automated instrumentation already has been outdated by equipment evolution and could have been incorporated into the chapter about general instrumentation principles.