Customer Reviews

McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science & Technology

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4 star:		(2)
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This book contains an enormous amount of information. However, there are two major problems. 1. It is often hard to find what you are looking for if you aren't using the same terminology they are. For instance, I looked for "Carbon dating", and it isn't listed - either in the text or the index. It is under "radiocarbon dating". There is no "carbon dating - see radiocarbon dating". I looked for "thermal radiation" and it wasn't there. It was under "heat radiation", again with no "see ...". In fact, there are no "see ..." in the text to point you to the right title. 2. The book claims that the material is given space according to its importance. "Atomic energy" gets 6 lines (2 sentences). I flipped to a random page, and "black pepper" gets more than twice as many lines, and "blackberry" gets 3 times as many lines.
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Well, the above was my original review of my 4th edition, which I wrote after having the book about a week. Now I find that the index is indeed good, I'm just not used to looking in an index rather in the body of the book.
Even the longer "Nuclear power" article is only a little longer than "blackberry". There is very little on evolution. Having seen the full 20-30 volume set at the library, this one-volume "concise" version misses a lot that is in the full set, and I'm not convinced that the abridged versions of the articles are as complete as they should be. But overall, I like it a little better than I did initially. I'll give it a 4.5.

The comment in the previous review about thermal radiation and heat radiation is fair enough, but I feel the reviewer is being unfair in other respects. The reason why there is no "See.." in the main text is because there is a very good index at the back! For instance under Carbon in the index, there is a page reference to radiocarbon dating. OK, there is no mention of carbon dating, so you would have to see radiocarbon dating, but you only have to scan a few lines of the index under the main entry on Carbon to find it. The comment about atomic energy is (unintentionally) misleading. Sure, the entry on atomic energy is very short, but there is a fair-sized entry on nuclear power and there is a cross-reference from atomic energy. Although the entry on nuclear energy is rather shorter than the two entries on oil and gas exploitation (a more relevant comparision than black pepper), it is backed up another fair-sized entry on nuclear reactors. I do think McGraw-Hill have made a decent effort to create an affordable science encyclopedia. (This refers to the 3rd edition, but I imagine the 4th edition is very similar).