I randomly picked this book up from the gift table at Restoration Hardware. After thumbing through it, it definitely seemed worth the money. No that I've had it for a while, it's paid for itself many times over. As a software engineer, the ASCII tables get the most use. Of course, whenever I whip this book out at work, everyone around ends up looking through it and heading straight to Amazon with the ISBN.

For personal use, the "General Use" and "First Aid" sections are handy. Some of the random facts in here can be pretty entertaining. Things you've never even thought about are broken down in this book. Various mathematical equations are available at your fingertips. There's a lot of random information as well as a lot of truly helpful facts.

I know that this review has a somewhat wandering tone to it, but it's so hard to just categorize everything that this book contains. Let's put it this way, the only thing that I have expected to find in the book that wasn't there so far was a calculation to find the great circle distance on the Earth between two latitude/longitude points. Once I did track down the equation online, I realized that, with the depth needed to calculate it, it's no surprise that it was overlooked. Everything else you could possibly need is in this book though. I highly recommend it! ( )

This handy little book lists a little bit of everything, but is never complete. The editing is accurate, albeit fairly sloppy. ( )