Customer Reviews

Science on the Web: A Connoiseur's Guide to Over 500 of the Best, Most Useful, and Most Fun Science Websites

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Science on the Web: A connoisseur's guide to over 500 of the best, most useful and most fun websites (1996) by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. New York USA: Springer.
Review by Bill Palmer

A great idea, but time does not deal kindly with books about the WWW. The fist half dozen pages of this book introduce the topic of the World Wide Web, claiming that the WWW is more famous than Michael Jackson or Newt Gingrich and more misunderstood than the Federal (American) budget. One can see what the author is driving at, but the choice of persons/topics does place the context of the book in the "America" of 1996. Although the WWW may currently be very much dominated culturally by the USA, one does feel that it will develop to be more culturally diverse than this.

The next dozen pages talk of web fundamentals and general sites for browser tools, HTML tools, search engines, etc.

The final section of the book is 347 pages long and is divided alphabetically into 16 sections on - artificial intelligence: artificial life: astronomy: biology etc. Many pages are pictures of the web pages being described. The book is set out well giving the impression of spaciousness. Each of the sections lists the contents on the first page, so one can see at a glance which sites have been included. Looking at the chemistry section, with which I am more familiar, I do note the absence of some sites that I consider excellent and note the presence of some sites with which I am not familiar.

I do not wish to be overcritical of this as the WWW is expanding at such an amazing rate that many/most of the sites may not have been in existence at the time the book was printed.

There is no separate section on science in spite of the fact that many of the sites which teachers and children might wish to access would be classified as science. The history of science has been almost completely neglected, which I find very disturbing. It is also difficult to understand who the main users of the book might be - it does not appear to be mainly for school students as some indication of the educational level of each site would be useful. There is however some comment and occasional assistance about how to use different sites, which can be very helpful.
Originally reviewed in 1997