Product Description
This up-to-date and comprehensive electronic book on two CD-ROMs presents an incredible and totally revised collection of important documents and publications about solar energy, solar heating and lighting, solar concentrating technology, and photovoltaic (PV) solar power cells. Encyclopedic coverage of every practical aspect of solar power, heating, electricity, and research is thoroughly covered in this incredible collection! Federal documents cover the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Photovoltaics Program; National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Center for Photovoltaics; Photovoltaics for Buildings; Photovoltaics Silicon Materials Research; Solar Decathlon; Amorphous Silicon; NREL Solid State Theory Group and Solid State Spectroscopy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; Environmental Safety & Health; DOE Climate Challenge; National Center for Photovoltaics; Photovoltaics Research & Development; Photovoltaic Silicon Materials Research; Amorphous Silicon; Solid State Theory; Spectroscopy. National Center for Photovoltaics (NCPV) Partnership Opportunities; PV Roadmap; Physics and Design of Solar Cells; R & D Partner Fact Sheets. Photovoltaics for Buildings coverage includes: Learn About PV; Homes and Commercial Buildings; Whole-Building Design; Solar Electricity; New Applications and Lessons Learned Report, much more. Viable solar energy technology topics covered include: Solar Cells * photovoltaic (PV) power * flat-plate PV * concentrating PV * off-grid * on-grid * conversion efficiencies * solar thermal electric * the existing solar industry * DOE research goals and targets * Thermal dishes * towers * troughs * central generation * passive solar * solar water heating * solar heating and lighting * nanotechnology solar cells * organic solar cells * abbreviations and acronyms. This CD-ROM set with two discs is packed with over 51,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems. The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material. Our news and educational discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed, searched by finding specific words, or printed without untold hours of tedious research and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain government information that might otherwise remain inaccessible are available for instant review no matter where you are. This book-on-a-disc format makes a great reference work and educational tool. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and portable - everything you need to know, from the federal sources you trust.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 1.0 based on 2 reviews)

No real value, look elsewhere

For some books, giving a rating can be hard if your level is different than what a book is focused on. An entry level reader would probably not purchase or rate an advanced book on some topic. In this case whether you are an entry level or advanced level reader, you will be frustrated with how many useless pages are present, the lack of proper indexing, and due to size of some of the documents and dependent upon your hardware is extremely slow to do a simple search. Typical examples are listed below:

Disk 1 has no index file
Disk 2 has an index.idx file. I use Acrobat 7.0 which expects index files of type index.pdx, maybe index.idx is for version 6 of Acrobat

Examples of some larger file sizes from each CD
* disk 1 has "EERE Solar RE.pdf" 372,096 KB - 17,101 pages
* disk 2 has "NREL PUBLICATIONS DATABASE.pdf" 230,689 KB - 5070 pages

The Adobe bookmarks appear to be page titles, in page number order that they appear in the pdf document. That is, the index is not in alphabetical order of the contents that you normally find at the end of a book. While some of the bookmark titles are not very helpful. For example, on disk 2, one document has bookmark ACR919D.tmp is for "Preliminary Energy Analysis of the Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection's Cambria Office Building Ebensburg". Not all documents have bookmarks.

Other examples include:
On disk 1 page 59 was a "Notice to Users" that this is a Federal computer system and is the property of the US Government etc.

On disk 1 from page 16776 for serveral pages was about W3C and Markup Validation Service, how is this relevant? How about login page for the American Bar Association??

It appears a web robot has downloaded all the web pages and then automatically transformed to pdf pages. This results in many pdf pages may only have the tail end of what was on the web page, but didn't quite fit onto a single pdf page. It also means web pages that have the optional printer friendly page are also included so there is duplication, normal web page and printer friendly of the same page.

Some of the links do correctly link to another page of the document, while others are external links requiring an Internect connection. Not obvious what type of link until you try it.

You should get the idea by now about the quality of these CDs

July 24, 2007

Solar Energy CD: Incomplete and difficult to use NREL Guide

This is nothing but a collection of existing data which is free from DOE, put on a CD with a very unfriendly indexing and access system. Although it includes a large amount of DOE energy info, much of which is dated and of little interest, it requires alot of time from the user to find data which could be of use.

May be of value to those people who don't have computers or internet access.
March 08, 2007

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