Perry's Chemical Engineers Handbook (International student edition) (Paperback)

The searching capability and hyperlink facilities are a boon - worth 5 stars on their own.

The "active" features are less impressive. Some active figures are graphs linked to the Activ8 programme. When you double click the object, this programme produces a new window with a dialogue box which can read the cursor position to you when it's over the graph. You can use this to copy and paste data. Other figures bring up just an image and the image is less clear than the original document! Active tables work in a similar way, and some allow for interpolation between tabulated values. If you copy and paste, the whole table is pasted, whereas I would have preferred to have been able to select some cells of interest and just paste them. I had thought the package also gave active formulae, a bit like a Mathcad worksheet or a spreadsheet perhaps, but there are none in this version despite the tempting claim on the box "On-screen problem-solving: tables, graphs, calculations". So, only 3 stars for the active bit.

The book is still very much an American one, and SI units are treated as second best. In fact, the book has an amazing variety of mixed units due to the many contributors .... but we chemical engineers are used to that, I suppose. It would be better for most engineers of today if it catered for SI units better. At least please provide an active units converter! How about the one called "Universal Units Converter" by Sarah Hanson, available free on the IChemE web site? 2 stars for that part.

The part I like least is the license agreement. I work with a number of colleagues, and the paper versions of our textbooks are passed around as needed and still spend most of their lives on the shelves. However you can only read this CD "book" at one desk, as the license restricts installation to one computer only. Clearly the manufacturer wants to prevent one copy from supplying the needs of a multi-national corporation, and for these users, multi-user and LAN licenses are available, which is fine. But restricting the single user license to one PC is an unnecessary nuisance. By all means forbid copying the CD, but please let us pass the CD between colleagues. Only 1 star for that, I'm afraid.

Overall? I'd still rate it 4 stars as it's just so useful in this electronic form. We metric engineers have long coped with Perry in US units, and we never had anything active before, so the current offering is better than before if a little disappointing. The license problem can be lived with - our office copy is now on a spare PC for all to use - I just think it's annoying. Hopefully future versions will build on this, and I hope that updates will not be full cost to owners of this version. Given these, it might be worth 6 stars!

I'll not bother with my paper copies of Perry again!