Amazing reference for work, personal and trivia use!

I randomly picked this book up from the gift table at Restoration Hardware. After thumbing through it, it definitely seemed worth the money. No that I've had it for a while, it's paid for itself many times over. As a software engineer, the ASCII tables get the most use. Of course, whenever I whip this book out at work, everyone around ends up looking through it and heading straight to Amazon with the ISBN.

For personal use, the "General Use" and "First Aid" sections are handy. Some of the random facts in here can be pretty entertaining. Things you've never even thought about are broken down in this book. Various mathematical equations are available at your fingertips. There's a lot of random information as well as a lot of truly helpful facts.

I know that this review has a somewhat wandering tone to it, but it's so hard to just categorize everything that this book contains. Let's put it this way, the only thing that I have expected to find in the book that wasn't there so far was a calculation to find the great circle distance on the Earth between two latitude/longitude points. Once I did track down the equation online, I realized that, with the depth needed to calculate it, it's no surprise that it was overlooked. Everything else you could possibly need is in this book though. I highly recommend it!

Let us see more of this kind

At the time when most publishers go racing on how fat a book can they make (someone ought to start suing for strain injuries :-), this gem brings the light back to our hands. It shows that is is possible to pack enormous ammount of information, and even use quite a lot of pages, and still retain all qualities of the small and light format.

Imagine the wonder of O'Reilly redesigning and publishing a few Nurshell books in this format, or CRC converting a few math and science references, or the ex-Wrox XSLT Programmer's Reference seeing the new printing ... I'm sure everyone who bought this book would have at least one more to add to this list.

Only lacking one thing....

I love this book and it would have gotten a perfect review, however it failed to tell me the meaning of life. Such an oversight shoulld not be forgiven...