Aquaponics for Beginners

Name: Aquaponics for Beginners
Price: 17.99 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Nick Brooke

How to Build your own Aquaponic Garden that will Grow Organic Vegetables

By Nick Brooke

Our review

Pages295

LanguageEnglish

FormatKindle edition

A starter manual that found its audience, with more than six hundred reviews on Amazon. Nick Brooke works through seven types of system, the maths behind bacterial surface area, the choice of fish and plants, and offers nine design plans to build from.

Price checked on 10/09/2026 17.99 €Price and availability are accurate as of the date shown and are subject to change. The price displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase applies.

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Overview Our review The author Specifications

Overview

Nick Brooke taught himself the subject, working through everything that had been written about it, and he says so in the introduction. The result is a dense starter manual, published in late 2018, that has gathered more than six hundred reviews on Amazon and remains one of the most widely read English-language titles in the field.

The book runs through seven types of system, explains the nitrogen cycle that makes aquaponics possible, then gets into sizing by way of the available bacterial surface area and the daily feed ration. Then come choosing fish and diagnosing their diseases, the plants to favour and the ones to avoid, a list of fifteen beginner mistakes, eighteen advanced techniques and nine design plans. He closes with the cheat sheet he uses himself to size a build.

Key takeaways

The surface available to bacteria is what limits a system, before water volume or fish numbers.
The amount of feed given each day drives plant growth as much as fish growth.
Seven configurations exist side by side, and the choice comes down to budget, available time and space, not to fashion.
Some plants are best avoided in aquaponics, and the book names them instead of staying vague.
Fifteen mistakes come up with almost every beginner, and knowing them saves you a season.

The editorial verdict

4.0/5

A good buy if you want a single manual that takes you from first principles to a build plan without switching books. It is more thorough than most English-language beginner guides, particularly on sizing and on advanced techniques. It is self-published, though: the layout and the copy-editing do not match Sylvia Bernstein's Aquaponic Gardening, which remains the written benchmark in the field. Buy it for the content, not for the finish.

The Univers-Aquaponie team

Independent editorial review. This page contains an affiliate link: if you buy through our link, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Pros

+Seven systems described and nine design plans in a single volume
+Tackles sizing through bacterial surface area, rare at this level
+An explicit list of the fifteen beginner mistakes
+More than six hundred customer reviews, one of the most read English-language titles

Cons

−Available in English only
−Self-published: uneven layout and copy-editing
−Published in 2018, the gear it names has dated
−No information on the European regulatory context

About the author

Nick Brooke describes himself in the book as self-taught. He says he knew nothing about aquaponics a few years before writing it, then read everything available on the subject before building systems of his own. That is the experience he sets out here.

He publishes no fuller biography, and we would rather say so than invent a career for him.

Did you know?

The book opens with a quotation from James Rakocy, the University of the Virgin Islands researcher known as the father of modern aquaponics. His work is the source of the feed-to-grow-area ratio that almost every manual uses today.