One of the best books you can get for aquaria in general would be
Captive Saltwater Fishes, by Steven Spotte, ISBN 0-471-54554-6, Published by Wiley-Interscience, although it is occasionally very difficult to acquire. It covers a great deal of the science behind aquarium husbandry and why things work the way they do, ~900 pages.
The chemistry of seawater is best covered by James Millero's
Chemical Oceanography, ISBN 0-8493-8840-6, published by CBC Press, ~500 pages.
For reef aquaria, I still like the Basics in
The Reef Aquarium already mentioned by Delbeek and Sprung. Julian doesn't post on TRT that I am aware of, but he is quite active in the hobby, great guy.
Eric's book specifically dealing with coral care and husbandry,
Aquarium Corals, is still the standard for hobbyist aquarium coral keeping at this point in time. Another active aquarium guy, although school is taking him to the dark side (professional)
The definitive I.D. reference for corals is J.E.N. Veron's
Corals of the World, in which Dr. Veron has included his own brand of ID key. It's a 3 vol set and well worth the money, ~1500 total pages.
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A really great invertebrate reference is the Ruppert and Barnes,
Invertebrate Zoology, ISBN 0-03-026668-8, published by Saunders College Publishing, ~1050 pages.
Several really good coral ecology books, I cannot choose a single fave, but two that I really like (although they are becoming a bit dated) are Tomas Tomasick's 2 volume
The Ecology of the Indonesian Seas, published by Garuda Indonesia, ISBN 962-593-078-7(Part I) and 962-593-163-5 (Part 2), ~1300 pages total, and very difficult to find, but an excellent reference to the ecology of the part of the ocean we are the most interested in, as well as Dr. Yuri Sorokin's
Coral Reef Ecology, published by Springer Scientific Pubications, ISBN 3-540-60532-0, ~450 pages. If you want Dr. Sorokin's book, look in European sources, this is a translation of the book from German written by a Russian, and occasionally the reading is a
little difficult.
For beginning reefers I like both the
John Tullock book and
Bob Fenner, no preference between the two.
I've never read the Fossa series of books, no opiniion on them.
There are a ton of books on species-specific fishes, etc, some are good, some are OK, a few are out of date now, look for the newer copyrights for most of there. Good authors include Helmut Debelius, Scott Michaels, Rudie Kuiter, Hans Baensch and several others that don't come to mind right off.
On algae, I have several books, but my fave in terms of applicability to our uses is Christopher Lobbam and Paul Harrison's
Seaweed Ecology and Physiology, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-40897-0 ~360 pages. It goes into several different biotopes, but covers mostly info on tropical seas and their enviromnemts. I have better books for ID's, and better books for the biology and physiology, but they are a chore to read.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, check your local college or university's bookstore for good resources, if possible, check one out at a library or look through it while there. If you need more info on the books I've listed, go to B&N or Amazon and enter the ISBN in the search and pull the title up, most of the info on how to get these books will either be listed there or have links to info on how to acquire these books.
hth.
