In MCAT prep literature there are good books which present a cycle of pared down conceptual explanations very well, alongside reasonable practice. The brevity is useful in that it is reasonable within three months to get to where you have the look and feel of every page, the structure, main points and figures imprinted in your mind. On the very short side, MCAT Pearls is pretty good, with Gold Standard, McGraw Hill and the bookstore Kaplan book being pretty good for this purpose, to give you a view of the most important learning goals, as if you were looking at all the neighborhoods of a city from the top of the tallest building.
On the other side are MCAT books where the experience is more in depth, more like exploring the neighborhoods at street level, much more articulation, interdisplinary exploration, and extensive test taking advice. In this group, I would put the materials sets from the big courses, Kaplan and TPR. To my mind, Berkeley Review is the only company making such a work legitimately purchasable on the open market. Although it adds up to being twice as expensive as the nearest competitor, the EK system, I think TBR is approximately an equivalent value proposition.
ExamKrackers is a good compromise between the two types. It's comprehensive and reasonably deep, with excellent paper and illustrations for the market - McGraw Hill is their only peer in product design - while being only about one hundred bucks. If I were a very confident student with three months to get ready, I might just rely on EK, my textbooks and practice exams. I just used my textbooks, Linus Pauling's General Chemistry, and no practice exams years ago and got a 38 with about six weeks of study, but I'm funny that way. From my teaching experience, I would say most students, even the most advanced students, would be better off taking six months to prepare for the MCAT and having both TBR and EK but I don't think most students understand how great MCAT preparation can be as an intellectual feast if you take your time with it.
