In my tirade yesterday I should have said that I was mainly aiming my
criticism at CD ROMs that followed the pattern of field guides.
Kim is quite right to say that there are some very useful other CD ROMs,
such as the Darwin one he mentions. As this is part of Kim's area then no
doubt if he recommends it then the Darwin CD is quite kosher; on some CD ROM
products like this you do have to watch for things like, which edition of
whatever work are they reproducing (it isn't always documented), which might
be important for whatever you use it for.
It's interesting to see that the prices of some CD ROM versions of major
reference works seem to have been coming down recently. Only problem for me
is that my eyes can't cope with reading text on a screen for a long time,
and if you print out the texts from CD ROMs it's more expensive than buying
the book.
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John Leonard (Dr),
PO Box 243,
Woden, ACT 2606
'I thought of New York as a Hemlock forest that had
been logged too heavily....'
Murray Gell-Mann
http://www.spirit.net.au/~jleonard
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