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Depends on what your preferred mode of learning things is. If you like visual passive inputs like lectures or videos, then there are plenty of ressources on youtube even with lectures from ivy league universities.

If you want to take the more formal approach and you like reading I guess there are a lot of introductiory genetics textbooks. You could find a comprehensive list here : https://www.bioexplorer.net/best-genetics-textbooks.html/.

Nowadays its very easy to find free lectures. Do you know MITopencourseware, edx.org, coursera etc.? You can see top-notch videos of actual lectures from MIT/Harvard/Yale whatever, or on edx or coursera you get free interactive courses from top professors that you can take and learn at your own pace.

At my Unversity we started Genetics 101 with the Griffiths "An introduction to genetic analysis".

For molecular biology I very much recommend to get the 'big Alberts' it's the ONE book for molecular biology that you'll have to get anyway no matter what and it's awesome. I love it. Check it out on amazon *link*.

No matter if its molecular biology or genetics, the best tip I can give you is: Do not ignore the "problems" or "questions" section at the end of each chapter, especially when you like these kind of things. They are at least 50% of your learning effect, trust me.

Oh damn sorry, obviously I suffer from the same phenomenon as you do I just focused a bit more on your post and saw that you do not prefer study text books as first primary attempt to get information. So the first and most important life lesson I can try to give you on your way would be: Do not try to fix your 'weaknesses' but exploit your strengths. If you struggle with reading dry science books, don't try to fight through numerous textbooks and hope it to change. Accept your preferences of studying, they evolved during the previous decades of your life according to your way of learning. Try to find a way that makes you want to learn about stuff. If that's not reading, fine accept it. But if you know or guess what type of medium it is that makes you want to learn stuff, exploit that to the very maximum! You sound to function similar to me, I never loved dry textbooks as I am not able to focus for extended amounts of time (found out that I got ADHD during my studies, so that made me understand. If problems focusing on extended readings is a thing for you, consider ADHD too please :)). So the way I learned was by not going to lectures (do not recommend that though) and just zapping through the slides because that way I could choose the speed, look up stuff I did not get on the spot and keep me engaged. Just try to figure out what your most efficient way of learning things is (not only talking about studying, also if you are interested in something for your private life, this also hints towards how you like consuming information). That's an important lesson I learned during my decade at Unversity.

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If you have any more questions, I'm here to help!

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source: I studied molecular biology starting 2010. 3 years of bachelors, 2 years of masters, and 4 years of PhD.

These texts tend to become outdated pretty quick, unfortunately. I used Genetics: A Conceptual Approach by Benjamin Pierce in undergrad for most of my degree program. It is alright but a bit dry, and while it does a great job explaining some concepts it just as often does poorly. I also really quite enjoyed Introduction to Genetic Analysis by Griffiths, et al., which I used earlier in my studies. I felt it did a better job of breaking topics and ideas down more than Pierce and it was laid out in a manner where each progressive chapter would build upon topics from the previous chapter instead of skipping around. Genetics is an interesting field of study, and hopefully these texts will help you achieve a better understanding of the topics that interest you (and others!).

You have a lot of questions that are difficult to answer without first giving you a solid grounding in what genes are, and how DNA works (which some of your questions suggest you don't yet have).

I suggest you try Genes - I've linked to version VI which is quite cheap, and for the basics not too far behind the state of the art. I think the latest version is XII, which has a few negative reviews claiming it's too advanced for undergrad-level genetics, so I've pointed you to VI which was my undergrad text and I didn't find too hard-going.

I'll try to give you some pointers, though:

1. and 2) No, position shouldn't matter, what matters is the sequence of base pairs in the DNA.
   
   
2. That can happen, if (simply put) the "core" (coding region) of the gene is swapped, but the flanking "control" regions are not swapped.
   
   
3. the number of genes doesn't affect much the length of the DNA. The length differ between species probably by random large-scale copying errors which expand (or reduce) certain stretches of DNA by duplicating them. Those stretches may or may not have genes on them. In humans as least genes represent a small % of the total length of DNA. I think you need a deeper understanding of what a gene is, and what alleles are.
   
   
4. the number of copies of a gene generally doesn't affect expression, but rather those control regions, and the presence of the proteins that recognise the particular control regions.
   
   
5. Dominance is actually a bit of an abstract concept. To take you eye example where a father has an eye and a mother doesn't. If the child gets one copy of their DNA with the "eye gene" and one copy without it, they will probably have an eye, because they have at least one gene. Here you can think of there being two alleles in the population, corresponding to a (large) difference in DNA sequence. The "eye" allele would be dominant over the "no eye" allele.
   
   I hope that helps a little, but keep reading! And youtube/google are not always the best sources. Perhaps a deep knowledge of genetics isn't needed for your purposes, but knowing the basics should help, and might give you some new ideas/directions.

> A really great basic textbook to Genetics that I used for my undergrad was Intro to Genetic Analysis by Alberts et al I think. Has a cute trio of doggos on the front cover!

That's by Griffiths et. al. It's a great book - I used the previous edition during my studies and still keep it on my shelf.

You can learn genetics without having to undertake any wet laboratory experiments in molecular biology/genetics.

Some suggested reading...

• Human Molecular Genetics : Great overview of the genetics of human diseases.
  
• An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory : very heavy on the mathematics (I spent ages searching for this 1970 out of print book, good to see its now reprinted).
  
• Evolutionary Genetics : excellent book, includes questions/tasks at the end of each chapter.
  
• Recombinant DNA : very good primer for molecular biology.
  
  There is tons out there, if you want to do some "experimenting" you could try writing computer simulations of changes in gene frequency under selection pressure. Learning to code is also an invaluable skill/tool too these days.
  

Depends on what you're looking for.
If you mean population genetics:
https://www.bookdepository.com/Genetics-of-Populations-Philip-W-Hedrick/9780763747725?ref=bd_ser_1_1

If you mean genetic epidemiology:
https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Genetic-Epidemiology-Muin-Khoury/dp/0195052889

Plus, read this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17554300

The problem is that everything gets outdated so quickly, but if you understand the pitfalls of a GWAS using 100K Affy SNP arrays, it's not a big leap to understand the related pitfalls using whole-exome sequencing as your genotyping method.

As a third option, I was going to list a preferred bioinformatics textbook, but it just seems silly to be honest. The best course of action is generally to learn to code (R or Python, plus BASH tools) and then to start using whatever software you're going to want to use to process genetic/epigenetic data.

If you are looking for a very broad overview of the molecular side of genetics, then I second previous comments that suggest Wikipedia. Start here and follow every link. If something isn't terribly clear to you, or you want more information about it, then read some of the journal articles linked in the references. Many of them are avaliable freely online, especially if you are accessing them from a college campus.

For online lecutre notes, you might find MIT's open courseware project to be helpful.

If you are looking specifically for a book to use, then Alberts et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell is considered a 'must have' bible for many practicing biological researchers. I find it a little too low level for deep knowledge. As a deeper alternative to Alberts, I suggest Weaver's Molecular Biology, which covers detailed molecular mechanisms of genetics at several different control levels, as well as including detailed descriptions of original experiments that uncovered the mechanisms, using figures from the original papers.

I am UK based, but their are no exam boards at university, so it makes no difference.

I recommend http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0123785944?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage . It makes genetics seem easy. Not much on genetic engineering though, but I'm not sure if that's a topic in the books yet as its a fairly new endeavour.

Saying that, "The Molecular biology of the cell" is the go to textbook for molecular biology studies. This is a solid textbook. The new edition is £60, but you can get the old edition for a lot cheaper on ebay though I tend to recommend new editions if you can afford it.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask or direct message me.

For general concepts in genetics, I recommend Introduction to Genetic Analysis. It's what a lot of undergraduate biology students are using now. Plus, the 10th edition is cheap because the 11th edition just came out. If you're more interested in a molecular understanding of the mechanisms at work, I recommend Molecular Biology: Structure and Dynamics of Genomes and Proteomes.

Postgrad geneticist here...I’d personally recommend molecular biology of the cell. It starts with basic principles and then gets increasingly more complex as it progresses.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0815344643/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1520383837&sr=8-2

It may be worth picking up an earlier second edition as the content doesn’t tend to vary greatly. Especially in well established concepts.

I'm a big fan of Hartwell et al, Genetics: From Genes to Genomes. In particular, the problems at the end of each chapter are the best I saw in any intro textbook.

Just added this to my amazon wishlist. Would you recommend it to an incoming pharmacy student? I'm actually about to start The Violinist's Thumb tomorrow, although it doesn't seem it will be nearly as heavy of a read as your book.

If anybody stumbles onto this discussion later, I found this book to have a fairly good treatment of basic variance component and heredity-related information.

Given your background I would recommend this

This is a good one:

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Molecular-Genetics-Fourth-Strachan/dp/0815341490

It doesn't talk about CRISPR, but if you don't have a biology background, there's obviously a lot of background information you need to know before you can try to understand CRISPR (which this book will provide).

Since gordonj has already written a fine answer, let me take another tack and suggest that the book An Ancestor's Tale is a very readable discussion of topics related to this.

I took a course in my undergrad about the genetic engineering of plants. I read most of this book and really enjoyed it. It is fairly basic in its concepts, but at the same time very informative and detailed.

>Human genome, and how modification really works

I'm not to well versed in the modification of the human genome. I don't think there is much literature in this area because there is not a lot of research that currently works with directly modify the human genome (ethical issues). I would imagine though there are books out there on the modification of animals and mammals in general.

There's an ethnography by Paul Rabinow from the 90s that talks about just how constructed and artificial this is. In fact, it's called "French DNA". We certainly have traceable ancestry, but this rarely follows national boundaries is only tangentially related to "nationality" per se.

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0231161174/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51xwQxZljmL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL100_SR100%2C100_&psc=1&refRID=Y92YH4WPFMCNMYNTFAYF

here's where I found it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079FYVV8J?customId=B07535Y1SC&th=1

Durbin's book, Biological Sequence Analysis is very good.

Some books on stochastic processes are useful.

Some HMM material

Also, a few journals that I read: Genetics, PLoS Biology/Genetics, MBE, GBE, and Theoretical Population Biology. If access is a problem, look to PLos, arxiv, bioRxiv.