21st Century Guidebook to Fungi

Why write a textbook? That's a question we've asked ourselves several times over the past few years; sometimes with exasperation, often in dismay at the mountain of tasks that remained to be completed. The authors have taught a general mycology course in the University of Manchester for many years. From the year 2000 increasing emphasis was given to Internet/Intranet-delivered modules for this course, providing students with yearly-enhanced resources in the form of PDF downloads of lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations as Flash movies, broadcast video and audio files streamed to the registered student end-user, and an extensive resource of reference material provided as full-text PDF for download from the Faculty Intranet. By the 2008/9 session these resources were distilled into a completely new online textbook: the first draft of 21st Century Guidebook to Fungi.

So we didn't actually make a decision to write a textbook; rather it emerged from our everyday (and every year) teaching. For something like 20 years our course portrayed Kingdom Fungi as a major eukaryotic Kingdom in its own right. Fungi have their own unique cell biology, their own unique developmental biology and their own unique lifestyle, and play critical roles in every ecosystem and every food web, and we thought it essential that biology undergraduates should be given the opportunity to understand all this.