Agreed, I did vascular for my surgery rotation and I think pestana and surgical recall are more than enough as your basic read-every-day sources. Obviously, make sure you read and understand the vascular chapters first since that's what you'll be seeing. Make sure you read before every case so you know what's going on. I would also make sure you read up in depth on a few high yield topics using whatever huge surgical text your school has a subscription to (ie. Schwartz, Sabiston, etc.). For vascular, you should learn all about CEA, indications, complications, etc. Know all about AAA and other vessel aneurisms, measurements we care about, when to operate, etc. You will see a lot of diabetes-related vascular disease, so make sure you know about DM and how it's managed. Have a working understand of the bread and butter vessel bypasses they do in the lower extremity. Know your vessel anatomy cold and be comfortable identifying it all on an angio since you'll be looking at these a lot. In clinic you'll also see a lot of venous stasis so be familiar with this. Review some of the major clinical trials for vascular like NASCET, CREST, ASCAS, etc. so you can recite their findings when you get pimped (and you will get pimped on these, though not by name -- knowing the name just makes you look like a rockstar).
That's not a lot of reading - maybe 100 pages or so tops - and should cover the bulk of what you'll encounter on service. Beyond that, just read for your patients, review your anatomy, and stay involved. Ask to scrub every chance you get; even if they say 'no' you still look interested. Most of all, have fun. Vascular is a great service with some really sick and medically complicated patients at times so there's a lot to learn on the floor as well. With every patient, read and make and present your own plan no matter how stupid you feel; this is how you'll learn. Do make an effort to branch out and see other services so you're comfortable with them. The shelf has a lot of trauma and GI and general pre-op and post-op management so the more you see, the better. People say it's a medicine shelf and it really isn't, but it's also not really about surgery either. In the end, the shelf is basically "what should EVERY physician know about surgery regardless of specialty?"
