The book is embarassing. I was looking for a reference text to update my knowledge of solar engineering, and what I got was a confusing conglomeration of project descriptions, uninformative, 'shallow' system descriptions, vendor data and pictures, green politics, and a lot of filler. The filler turned me off within minutes of cracking the book. Things like 25 plus pages of lat long data for cities around the world, and lists of 'sustainable energy suppliers and consultants' (that may have been useful when the book was published, but decays exponentially with time since.) The author presents 'facts' that are nothing but erroneous hyperbole representing political opinions rather than engineering concepts or application. Throughout the book, efficiency is a concept that no longer is mathematically or physically defined consistently. Thermal plants are inefficient because they obey the 2nd law (34%), but solar conversion efficiencies are not an issue (rarely approaching 20%)



Illustrations are simplistic, photographs are more artistic than technically illustrative. There are dozens of illustrations of how to bolt metal together or to roofs - none of which are useful. Entire sections appear to have been written for and lifted from 'gee-whiz' pamphlets or displays rather than an engineering reference book, things like information on half-flush lavatories and landscaping (pg 201) and museum displays and software to generate them (pg 78).



Look elsewhere for technically useful information. The net and a search engine will provide much more useful and current information. Luckily I still have my solar engineering course notes from the late 70s and because they provide much more useful information than this '...Engineer's Complete Design Resource.' Hopefully there is a good book out there for me, but this one isn't it.