The Ultimate Ball Python: Morph Maker Guide by Kevin McCurley (2014-05-04) Hardcover – January 1, 2014

When I was a teen, I wanted a python. Any time I could find someone that had a snake I was always asking questions and asking to hold them. Instead of telling me I couldn’t have a snake, my mother introduced me to a co-worker who had a few of them. She told me about how delicate they could be and what kind of care they required. Needless to say, at 16 I was not ready to put that kind of money or time into caring for a pet so I gave up my quest to own a python.Fast forward more than 30 years and I finally got my first python, and then another and another. One thing my mother’s coworker failed to tell me was how addicting they are! So I’ve decided I may try my hand at breeding in the future and asked other hobbyists what resources were best for identifying and learning about the different ball python morphs (colors) currently available. Hands down, the answer was Kevin McCurley’s The Ultimate Ball Python: Morph Maker Guide.If you look, the book is a bit expensive. I will tell you now, the price is worth it. There are pages and pages of color photos as well as information about genetics and history. For anyone who is really interested in different morphs and descriptions, this book is a good idea. It explains co-dom and recessive genes and which are compatible and which are not. I can imagine spending many hours going through this book to learn all I can before taking the breeding plunge. It is definitely worth the money!

If you plan on breeding ball python's this book is a must to own. It has an unbelievable amount of information and hundreds of color photos. It explains the complicated genetics in fairly easy to understand terms. Very happy i invested in the book, worth every penny of it.

I LOVE this book! It's so informative and the pictures are amazing. It arrived faster than it was expected, too. I was surprised that no reviewers had uploaded photos of the inside of the book, so I took a few to show just how wonderful it looks.

My grand daughter loves this book. The pics are amazing. Every page has a glossy, 7"x5" real pic of a snake. Good Buy

I got this as a Christmas gift for my boyfriend and he really enjoyed it and I like looking at all the different morphes.

A big complicated book that is full of information. Makes a great reference and is a good read as well.

Awesome book! Good start on getting to know the morphs!

So to preface, the item I received wasn't as advertised. I bought a new hardcover copy off of Amazon from "Small Fury pet supply wholesale inc." However, nothing about this item met Amazon's "New" condition standards: no original packaging, corners were bent, and some pages have small nicks and markings from brief use. Shipping quality was also sub-par, only arriving in a thinly cushioned USPS envelope that offered nearly zero protection. Learn from my mistake and do not buy from this seller.Now on to the book itself.TL;DR: Buy it. Worth every penny thanks to the low availability of consolidated info at present.If one doesn't know anything about ball pythons and their slew of patterns and hues, The Ultimate Ball Python: Morph Maker Guide may be slightly difficult to use as a standalone source. It isn't an issue with all of the information not being present, but instead with how the book itself is organized: outside the lovely descriptions dedicated to base morphs, explanations of all kinds are very short, and many key terms are glossed over without much context given to them, plus there are no written commentaries on morph combos to point out nuances that the novice would certainly miss; the formatting is also worrisome, containing many spacing errors and a rampant use of quotation marks that gets slightly confusing at times; in a similar vein, it seems that many ideas would have benefited from being placed in closer proximity to one another, perhaps in their own introductory section instead of appealing to such a strict regiment by squeezing them in front of a given section fifty pages away from their sister concepts (e.g. the descriptions given for simple recessive, incomplete dominant, dominant, and super, as well as the breeding nuances between them); finally, the potential that the author and editor(s) were going for when it came to conveyance style could have been fully utilized had the book been given larger dimensions, with words segmented into columns, alongside the generous number of photographs. (And such lovely images they are! I would've nearly purchased this book for them alone.)Lastly, while probably obvious, considering that it's already three years old and on top of the volatile, early stages that the species' breeding industry is still going (slithering?) through, this book is also most definitely out of date.Despite all of these shortcomings -- some avoidable, others not -- Kevin McCurley makes all of this seem trivial compared to the fact that he has, in one fell swoop, offered *the most* thorough consolidation of ball python morph info. Period. If you can put in the extra effort to navigate through its ideas and pages, any newcomer to ball python morphs/breeding will undoubtedly take away a solid foundation from which to build upon.