Customer Reviews

2007 Solar Energy: Complete Guide to Solar Power and Photovoltaics, Practical Information on Heating, Lighting, and Concentrating, Energy Department Research (Two CD-ROM Set)

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This is nothing but a collection of existing data which is free from DOE, put on a CD with a very unfriendly indexing and access system. Although it includes a large amount of DOE energy info, much of which is dated and of little interest, it requires alot of time from the user to find data which could be of use.

May be of value to those people who don't have computers or internet access.

For some books, giving a rating can be hard if your level is different than what a book is focused on. An entry level reader would probably not purchase or rate an advanced book on some topic. In this case whether you are an entry level or advanced level reader, you will be frustrated with how many useless pages are present, the lack of proper indexing, and due to size of some of the documents and dependent upon your hardware is extremely slow to do a simple search. Typical examples are listed below:

Disk 1 has no index file
Disk 2 has an index.idx file. I use Acrobat 7.0 which expects index files of type index.pdx, maybe index.idx is for version 6 of Acrobat

Examples of some larger file sizes from each CD
* disk 1 has "EERE Solar RE.pdf" 372,096 KB - 17,101 pages
* disk 2 has "NREL PUBLICATIONS DATABASE.pdf" 230,689 KB - 5070 pages

The Adobe bookmarks appear to be page titles, in page number order that they appear in the pdf document. That is, the index is not in alphabetical order of the contents that you normally find at the end of a book. While some of the bookmark titles are not very helpful. For example, on disk 2, one document has bookmark ACR919D.tmp is for "Preliminary Energy Analysis of the Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection's Cambria Office Building Ebensburg". Not all documents have bookmarks.

Other examples include:
On disk 1 page 59 was a "Notice to Users" that this is a Federal computer system and is the property of the US Government etc.

On disk 1 from page 16776 for serveral pages was about W3C and Markup Validation Service, how is this relevant? How about login page for the American Bar Association??

It appears a web robot has downloaded all the web pages and then automatically transformed to pdf pages. This results in many pdf pages may only have the tail end of what was on the web page, but didn't quite fit onto a single pdf page. It also means web pages that have the optional printer friendly page are also included so there is duplication, normal web page and printer friendly of the same page.

Some of the links do correctly link to another page of the document, while others are external links requiring an Internect connection. Not obvious what type of link until you try it.

You should get the idea by now about the quality of these CDs