| Ken Shirriff -> Books -> Reference book reviews |
Rules of the Game : The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of All the Sports of the World by Diagram Group.
Ever wondered about the rules of snooker, the difference between slalom and super-G, or what's going on in cricket? This is the book for you. With detailed pages explaining the rules of 150 sports from darts to football to yachting, this is a useful guide.
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics : A Ready-Reference Book of Chemical and Physical Data
The classic reference for the scientist; just about everything is in here.
The Merck Index : An Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs, and Biologicals.
If you want information about chemicals or drugs, this is the place to look, with much more detail then the CRC handbook. Each of the 100,000 entries has not only the expected formula, structure, and properties, but information on uses, historical references, source, etc.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Angela Partington.
My favorite dictionary of quotations, I find it much easier to find quotations here than in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, due to the organization and indexing.
If you need US statistics, the book to have is Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997 also published as The American Almanac. The 1400 tables here contain everything from government budgets to bankruptcies to workers emploeyed in beauty shops to retail prices of bananas to mileage of railroads to populations and life expectancies. Or you get all the data from the statistical abstract web site.
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Copyright 1998 Ken Shirriff. |