Protostars and Planets IV (Space Science Series)

Rating:
Summary: Good but not as good as PP III was originally
Review: Again an exemplary introduction (the fourth in this series) to the field of stellar and planet formation. However because of the sheer bulk of the material, the editors (or publishers?) have decided to have shorter review articles rather than splitting the book up into two volumes. Although the articles are once again top-notched, their somewhat abbreviated length makes them a bit less useful than a full length Annual Reviews article would have been.

I do have a nitpick about the competing chapters by Konigl & Pudritz and Shu et al. on the acceleration mechanisms for launching jets and outflowing winds from young stars. It's a shame these authors couldn't have put aside differences and worked together. As it is, we have two different competing theories presented separately, instead of a true review covering all the hypotheses proposed for wind launching.

Despite these minor problems, the book is still quite useful. (However because of these problems, it's probably not as useful as PP III had been when it first came out.) I have not had a chance to go through all of the chapters (a truly monster task given the volume's 1400+ pages), but nearly all of the ones I was able to sample were well written, provocative, informative, and highly useful for any researcher in the field. The breadth of coverage is simply amazing, from astrophysics to planetary science, spanning the parsec-sized molecular clouds down to the formation of microscopic inclusions in meteorites in the early solar system. It will be a useful reference for any scientist in the field for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: most useful volume
Review: The "Protostars and Planets" series is a remarkably successful set of books covering (or attempting to cover) the very rapidly growing area of star-and-planet formation and evolution. Far more than a conference proceedings (containing unrefereed reviews), these books have strived (and I think achieved this goal) to give us the balanced overview of a major part of the new astronomy. This IVth volume is no exception. It is most useful for researchers, graduate students, and some undergraduate students (though a guidance on what to read and what to skip from a senior researcher would be a plus).

Like in the previous ones, 2-4 respected specialists in each subject authors have usually been contracted to cooperate on a given chapter (there are about 50 chapters covering the diverse landscape from collapsing molecular clouds to the inner structure of planets). In certain cases (I think I can identify 2), somewhat predictably, the good efforts of the editors failed because of personal animosities between the chosen authors, in which case two chapters instead of one have been published. I do not see this as a problem, except for the unfortunate need to squeeze all the other reviews to fit the overall page limit. Scientifically, I would much rather hear two different stories than one with artificially plastered-over division lines. One other laudable choice made by the editors was the adoption of the usual citation style, and giving up the questionable practice from some previous volumes of bunching up all the cited literature from all chapters at the end of the book (making it impossible to copy a chapter and its references only). A minor gripe is the lack of sufficient references to Web resources. In the long run, of course, they would be less useful ("NOT FOUND: The requested URL was not found on this server.") but in a rapidly developing area of study this applies to some texts as well.

The high quality of the reviews, connected not only with the choice of authors but also the fact that the chapters have been refereed, the timeliness of the reviews (cf. the enormous demand for overviews of extrasolar planetary systems), and finally the nearly-certainty that we will not see any comparable effort for the next 5 to 7 years, all speak strongly in favor of regarding this book as a top position in the field, well worth its price.

For those graduate students and others, who want to see only selected parts of the book, it would be extremely useful if the publisher agreed to provide separate chapters on the web in the pdf format, and access mode discouraging massive downloads to a single site.