As a first-year dermatology resident, you are finally in the role you worked so hard for, yet you are expected to function, contribute, and grow from day one. The most prepared residents aren’t necessarily the ones who memorized the most before July. They’re the ones who built the right foundation — the right resources, the right habits, the right systems — so they’re ready when the learning accelerates. This guide covers options of what to read, what to learn, and what to set up in your first weeks of residency.
Part I: What to Read
1. Your Core Clinical Textbook
Every derm resident needs a primary textbook — one reference they know well enough to navigate intuitively, not a collection of books they’ve opened twice.
Bolognia’s Dermatology is the field’s most comprehensive clinical reference. It is thorough, well-illustrated, and authoritative across nearly every topic you’ll encounter. It’s also dense, so it can be intimidating in your first few months of residency. For your first pass through the material, Andrews’ Diseases of the Skin is a worthwhile alternative. Think of it as a more accessible version of Bolognia that makes early reading feel less like climbing a wall. Once you’ve built familiarity with a topic through Andrews, Bolognia can be used to further ingrain details.
Don’t try to master both simultaneously. Pick the one that fits where you are in training, and build from there.
2. Your Board Review Companions
Think of these not as replacements for textbook reading, but as companions to it — resources you run in parallel to reinforce, consolidate, and test what you’re absorbing from your primary text.
Derm In-Review is given to residents for free through your program. It lays material out in an easy-to-digest way with special pearls and boards fodder highlighted through the text. It is also in audio form for free on the Derm In-Review website, read by some of the best dermatologists in our field. This makes it easy to do some learning on the go and feel accomplished. Video recordings of workshops and quizzes are also available on the website.
Review of Dermatology (Alikhan & Hocker) is a reliable single-volume review covering clinical derm, dermpath, basic science, and procedures in an organized, readable format. This is the most commonly used review book amongst residents. If you like to annotate, many residents add additional facts throughout their years as they are building their fund of dermatology knowledge. It works well alongside your primary reading to consolidate material across categories.
Comprehensive Board Review in Dermatology earns its place on this list for a specific reason: It doesn’t just present diagnoses — it pulls diagnosis, pathology, and treatment together in one place, then explicitly compares and contrasts related conditions. When you’re reading about one condition, this book often helps you understand others at the same time. If I could go back, I would definitely incorporate this earlier on as a PGY-2. It also has questions tailored to the Basic, Core, and Applied examinations.
3. Board-Based Question Practice
AAD Qbank: The most board-relevant question bank available. This will be the most helpful when preparing for your Core and Applied exams. Being on a limited salary, I took advantage of the payment plan to be able to afford it in my last two years of residency.
DermQbank: I used this resource throughout the three years of residency. They have questions specifically for Basic exam preparation as well as the other examinations. It can be helpful to quiz yourself when studying early on. What makes this resource great is that it has a good filter you can use to only review questions of a specific topic. It also has charts and explanations that you can use in your review of subjects.
4. Dermatopathology Fundamentals
Dermpath is the one area where residents consistently wish they had started earlier. The language is its own system, and building a basic foundation from the beginning pays dividends that compound over three years. You will eventually appreciate aspects of dermpath to give you a better understanding of clinical correlations.
Elston’s Dermatopathology is a perfect starting point in learning dermatopathology. The chapters are broken up by path types, and photos highlight the important patterns and cells to pick up on histology to cinch diagnoses.
Pathpresenter is a free resource where you can practice looking at different histology slides of the same diagnoses. From day one, make your own pathpresenter collections broken up into the different patterns. If you start to review and compare early on, you will be ahead of the game.
YouTube videos are also great in simplifying dermpath, including videos by Jerad Gardner, Sagis, and Cockerell.
5. Digital Access — Set This Up Early
Get your textbooks in ebook format wherever possible. When you’re rounding on consults and need to look something up quickly, having Bolognia and Alikhan on your phone is meaningfully better than hunting down a physical copy. Check whether your institution’s library system provides digital access before you purchase anything — many do. The same applies to VisualDx: Many programs have institutional access, and the VA system often does as well, so check before paying out of pocket. Our field is extremely visual, so it is important for us to see several presentations of the same conditions to be able to properly identify them on patients.
Part II: What to Learn
Morphology — The Language of Dermatology
Morphology is a dermatologist’s primary language. It is not just vocabulary — it is the cognitive framework you use to build a differential, communicate with colleagues, and think through a case. Investing real time in understanding morphological distinctions before and early in residency pays off more than almost anything else you can do.
Know the difference between a macule and a patch, a papule and a plaque, a vesicle and a bulla, a pustule and an abscess. Understand secondary changes — scale, crust, lichenification, erosion, ulceration — and what they tell you about chronicity and mechanism. Practice describing every lesion you see before you name it. This discipline trains your eye and forces precision.
Morphology also connects directly to histopathology. A spongiotic process clinically produces a vesicle; a psoriasiform process produces scale on a plaque. The better your grasp of morphology, the more efficiently your derm path knowledge integrates with your clinical reasoning. They reinforce each other.
Dermatology-Specific Pharmacology
Know the mechanisms, major indications, contraindications, and monitoring for our commonly use medications: systemic retinoids, systemic immunosuppressants, biologics and antifungals. If you incorporate this early, it will make it that much easier for your Core and Applied exams.
A tip I was given was making dot phrases for my clinic notes that includes the mechanism, contraindications, and monitoring for each drug. This makes writing your notes faster. Plus, making the phrase yourself and incorporating it all into your notes are ways you are studying these medications without actively doing so.
Another pharmacology resource is Next Steps in Derm’s Therapeutic Cheat Sheet Series, which provides information on mechanisms of action, dosage, approved and off-label uses, adverse events, monitoring guidance, and more for a variety of common dermatologic medications.
Part III: What to Set Up
Your Study System — And Only Yours!
Resource overload is a real danger in dermatology residency. Our field has excellent textbooks, review books, question banks, image libraries, and podcasts — more than any resident can meaningfully use. The residents who struggle most are often the ones who are constantly switching between resources rather than going deep on the ones that work for them.
Think back to what actually worked in medical school. If you’re someone who learns by writing things out, build that into your derm studying. If making your own Anki cards from textbooks is how you encode information, do that. If reading a chapter and then immediately doing questions on it is your method, trust it. The study approach that got you here is worth building on — you don’t need to reinvent it, you need to apply it to a new specialty.
Pick two or three resources, learn them well, and return to them consistently. That is more valuable than sampling from everything.
Your Note-Taking and Retention System
Whatever platform you use — Anki, Notion, OneNote, a paper notebook — the principle is the same: Capture what you learn at the point of learning, in a format you can retrieve later. Notes that never get reviewed again aren’t a system, they’re an archive.
Your Logbook
Start logging procedural cases from your first clinical day. Don’t batch-enter them at the end of a rotation — you’ll miss cases, forget details, and lose documentation that matters for your portfolio, credentialing, and eventual job applications.
Relationships with Co-Residents
Your co-residents are your most immediate educational and professional community for the next three years. The class that communicates well, shares resources, and looks out for each other navigates residency differently than one that doesn’t.
Wellness — Hold On to Something
This deserves more than a bullet point.
Residency is demanding, and dermatology is not exempt from that. The transition to attending life will come, but you have to get there intact — and that requires more than efficiency and good study habits.
Before you’re too deep into your first year, identify the thing that keeps you yourself. Working out. A TV binge one night a week. Consistent time with friends or family. Whatever it is, hold on to it. Protect it. Regardless of what is happening in residency — the hard weeks, the steep learning curves, the moments you feel behind — find a way to keep that thing in your life. It is not a reward for surviving residency. It is part of surviving residency.
Wellness isn’t a box to check or a program to attend. It’s the discipline of keeping something that makes you happy, even when everything else is pulling at your time.
A Note on Starting Before You’re Ready
Every resident feels underprepared at the start. This is not a failure of preparation — it is the nature of entering a clinical specialty that rewards longitudinal pattern exposure and experiential learning. The residents who thrive are not the ones who know the most on day one. They are the ones who learn most efficiently, ask the right questions, and build the right systems early enough that the compound interest starts accruing.
The goal of everything in this guide is not to frontload the entire curriculum of your residency. It is to get you oriented — to the language, the resources, the habits, and the infrastructure — so that when the real learning begins, you are already in motion.
Artificial intelligence tools were utilized during the editing of this article.