Duncan Ville

Today there are literally millions of documents on the Web Every subject known to humankind can be found here. But finding what you want amid this mountain of data can be more than time-consuming.
Even if you use one of the popular search-engines on the Web to isolate all Web sites containing information on a given topic such as comets (or thermodynamics, or lipids, or polychlorinated biphenyl’s, etc.), you will still have to spend a fair amount of time browsing through the many documents called up by your search in order to see
which ones provide the richest information base.
One comet page, for example, may contain nothing more than a collection of 200-year-old observations of Comet Halley with no accompanying links, while another page will provide a cornucopia of information and resources on all aspects of the study of comets from ancient times right up to the present day, with a long list of related links, including an appropriate description of (and a link to) the limited Comet Halley page for those who want it. Which of these two documents is more useful? Which would you prefer to spent time on? The latter document is the one you will find discussed in this book. In writing this book I have endeavored to provide a guide to the most useful and informationally rich resources for scientists on the Web. I have scoured the various Web information options in a range of scientific disciplines and cut out the shallow and trivial in favor of
the deep and meaningful. Thus, this book comprises a directory to the most ambitious science pages on the web, not only rich in links that leverage to the utmost the possibilities of hypertext but also rich in layers of vital, current data as represented in text, graphics, and audio.