The Gale Encyclopedia of Science

Rating:
Summary: Not worth $450
Review: Fortunately, I got it at a library sale for a fraction of that price.

The major pro: it's a good series of books for basic reference.

Major con #1: it's badly edited; there are many pages where there are chemical formulas that are misprinted, typos in headers, etc. I can only imagine if, say, Encyclopedia Britannica had this many errors.... [On the other hand, this seems to have been corrected for the third edition.]

Major con #2: the cross-reference system borders on the idiotic. The first time the title of *any* article appears, it is boldfaced, even if the context is essentially irrelevant.

Major con #3: it has a lot of depth in what it covers, but it isn't useful for reference on "deep" topics (e.g., if you want to know about optics, this book is good; if you want to learn about Fermi-Dirac statistics, go elsewhere).

All in all, if you can get this really cheap, try it. If not, though, you might be better off buying, say, several volumes of the Cambridge Encyclopedia series: you'd get more depth for the same amount of money.