Customer Reviews

2008-2009 Essential Guide to Solar Energy, Photovoltaics, Solar Cells, Roof Panels, Heating, Lighting, Concentrating - Complete Guide with Practical ... and Government Research (Two CD-ROM Set)

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I bought this product based on the previous review (I am now suspicious if that really was an independent review).

Unfortunately, these CD's are completely useless. These only contain screen-shots of freely available information from government sites. I could see some value if these were grouped or sorted in any way (or the data pulled into excel).

But, it was nothing of the sort -- anyone could just surf the various websites to get the information for free. Additionally, the information was out of date the second they were put into the CD's...the sites are updated frequently.

Very disappointing -- I must admit that the low price did make me a bit suspicious...but, I bought it based on the review (which was utterly false). Save your money and just use Google!

There is a lot of information on the Adobe Acrobat documents they put on the CD--thousands of pages actually. It's all completely useless. The PDF documents aren't even organized, they just have thousands of pages in each document to "make for easy searching" as the readme file claims . I bought the set and looked through it for 2008 information, it was few and far between.

Perhaps if it was better organized with categories by individual PDFs I could find what I want, but I am not going to look through screen shots taken off the Department Of Energy's website.

The information in this industry is rapidly changing each year, so using a report from 2006 would be far too risky now.I've found about 30 relevant, recent, and useful research reports on my own.

For anyone who wants a reference source detailing all the various aspects of solar energy, solar heating and lighting, solar power cells, solar technology and photovoltaics, this is the guide for them. They will discover that these (2) CD's are more than worth the money they cost. This solar energy guide contains an archive of 50,000 pages of official public domain U.S. government files and documents, which were privately compiled. The data is very comprehensive, detailed, and thorough and is very well researched. I highly recommend it to any student of alternative energy or for anyone who wishes to research the field of solar power.