The more I use this book the more I like it. I use five "handbook-type" sources: this book, the old NBS handbook, the handbook by Bronshtein and Semendatyev, MathWorld on line, and Wikipedia on line; all have their virtues, and I would not do without any one of them. The great virtue of the CRC handbook is not that it's complete, which it isn't, and which no handbook can hope to be. Rather, given that the use of a handbook is to fill in missing facts or techniques in one's knowledge, that I can understand almost anything in the CRC handbook by reading it just once, without having to cross-reference to other sources or other parts of the book. This is an extremely difficult thing to achieve, and I tip my hat to the contributors and editors for doing it so well.
Inevitably, the book pays a price for this. It's most notable in Chapter 8, "Scientific Computing", which is remarkably clear, at the expense of detailed discussion. Fine; so be it. At least I can understand everything it says. Given my druthers, I might have omitted some things from the book to make space for more thorough coverage of certain topics. My criterion wold be based on the assumption that anyone who refers to this volume with any frequency can be presumed to have a reasonably good scientific pocket calculator, so that those things that can be determined by a few keystrokes on a calculator could be safely omitted from this handbook. For example, although a discussion of indefinite integrals and a list of some of the less obvious ones is clearly appropriate, my pocket calculator will disgorge 95% of those listed in a 36-page table in this book if I just enter the integrand and ask for the indefinite integral by a single comand. Hence, my own preference would be to limit the list in the handbook to perhaps 5 pages, including discussion, and use that space to give more coverage to special functions and the relationships among those. But that's purely a matter of personal preference.
An additional advantage of this handbook is that it's inexpensive, considering how much it contains. I get discouraged by the prevalence of technical books that I could really use, but which sell for so much that I can only consult them in my local library or get them on interlibrary loan. This book is inexpensive enough so that any techie who wants a copy can have his or her own. I wish there were more like it.