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Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: All you ever wanted to know about calendrical stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Great for calendars - Legal issues in using code
Review: I highly recommend the book if you are interested in calendars as a hobby. If you are using this book for a project I suggest you look at this soley as a reference, since you will have to look elsewhere to have something you can use. The bibliography included is a good source.The details and discussions of how they approach problems like the visibility of sunset are amazing and really opened my eyes to the difficulties of creating an accurate calendar under different systems. This book covers everything I could think of and quite a few ideas I would never consider. I would give it 5 stars, except that the code and algorythms provided in the book are copyrighted and can not be used without explicit permission of the authors. I contacted the authors for a project I had, but it was determined that I could not use their algorithms since I intended to release under GNU license.
Rating:
Summary: Great for calendars - Legal issues in using code
Review: I highly recommend the book if you are interested in calendars as a hobby. If you are using this book for a project I suggest you look at this soley as a reference, since you will have to look elsewhere to have something you can use. The bibliography included is a good source. The details and discussions of how they approach problems like the visibility of sunset are amazing and really opened my eyes to the difficulties of creating an accurate calendar under different systems. This book covers everything I could think of and quite a few ideas I would never consider. I would give it 5 stars, except that the code and algorythms provided in the book are copyrighted and can not be used without explicit permission of the authors. I contacted the authors for a project I had, but it was determined that I could not use their algorithms since I intended to release under GNU license.
Rating: 
Summary: Super
Review: Super! Better than the first edition: give it 6 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Errata for this edition/pringing is 71 pages long
Review: The 2001 printing of this book is full of errors. The author's errata list is 71 pages long. Get the 2nd printing: paperback with updated CDROM. I'm going to be returning mine.
Rating:
Summary: Everything you ever wanted to know about calendars!
Review: The first edition was a masterpiece, but this one is evenbetter! I've been involved in proof reading the new edition, and I'veread the final draft. There are lots of popular books out there about calendars and the history of calendars. Unfortunately, most of them are filled with mistakes, especially when they talk about non-European calendars. The purpose of this book is to both give reliable information about the different calendars and to provide software for calendrical computations. My own field is the Chinese calendar, and this is one of only two books that gets it right (the other is the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac). If you want to get the facts, there's no other comparable book. Remember to check out the web site of the authors to get the software and check out the applets. END
Rating:
Summary: Anonymous's criticisms baseless
Review: The previous review criticizes us for having a lengthy document reporting errata--but most of that document is not errata at all, but notes with extra material! C.U.P. introduced 10 spots where some lines were lost in the 2nd printing; when that was discovered they withdrew the printing and filled all orders with the hardback first printing.
Perhaps "anonymous" would have been happier if we did not share the details of errors with readers, but we feel it is in the reader's interest to have the errata open to public.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but pseudocode hard to swallow
Review: This books teaches you a lot of about the mathematics
that needs to go behind calculations to determine date/time,
and is truly a must-read book for people who want to
write such software. However, I did find the equations hard to adopt for my
own use, partially because the pseudocode fails to show
exactly what the units were. For example, on the later
chapters where one must take into account planetary
position and such, it is extremely hard to find out
exactly what each variable/number represent if you're
not already very familiar with the subject. I believe
most of the definitions are in fact in the book *somewhere*,
but they are buried deep. This makes it extremely cumbersome and
time consuming for the reader to actually try to
implement the calculations. If the notation can be improved a bit, I think it would
be even better book.
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