I got the 1999 version of HY Cell and Molecular Bio and found it to be too outline-y. The copy I got looks almost bootlegged since there's no index, and has these pictures that look like they were photocopied! How is the recent version? Is it longer? There are some things in biochem FA that I couldn't find in either RR or HY!
I like the new version. I think there are some things in there that are certainly beyond what step one (or even UWorld) require, like extensive genetic descriptions of the constituents of the hox complexes or detailed explanations of the gene product actions of all of the translocations of ALL's and/or AML's other than M3 (pretty sure step 1 won't ask about any of them, and UWorld hasn't in 1000+ questions). On the other hand, for the first time I have a decent grasp of inner-workings of oncogenes and tumor suppressors, and a lot more understanding of cell signaling and membrane transporters.
I think the best thing about the HY CMB book (at least, the new addition) is that it seems to span a variety of topics and bring them together, which has helped consolidate my knowledge. It grabs a lot of stuff from cell biology, biochemistry, genetics, immunology, oncology, and virology. It's pretty good about using clinical disease examples for each type of mutation, inheritance, etc. And it has some nice summary tables for things that I've had a hard time finding all in one place (like all the cancer/leukemia mutations/translocations, membrane receptors, etc.).
The down side of the new edition is that the editing was horrible. There are typos all over the place. Captions under a picture will say it is a gross picture of a brain and it has a smiling kid's face. The text flip-flops from using greek symbols for alpha/beta to just using 'a' and 'b' to spelling them out as I did. And the text is
mostly written in full sentence paragraph style (like Lippincott Biochem) but then you often run into sentence fragments, like the author stepped into outline mode for a moment. I don't mind either, but it breaks the continuity of reading when you get used to one style and then rudely find yourself wondering where the rest of a sentence went. And then there are missing words, duplicated words, etc. Grammatical mistakes like subject/verb plurality agreement, etc.
Not that any of that is terribly important, but in a book chock full of the alphabet soup of genes, proteins, receptors, ions, and other abbreviations you do start to wonder what else might have been a typo.