Dictionary of Minor Planet Names: Prepared on Behalf of Commission 20 Under the Auspices of the International Astronomical Union

Rating:
Summary: A waste of time
Review: Asteroids are being numbered at a rate of thousands per month now. It is simply too costly to spend [money] in a book that become out dated the minute it was printed.

The book also contain a more updated CD but it contain so much error. This book is a waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing else like it, but...
Review: This edition has some truly serious typos -- it omits entire lines here and there! I have a previous edition (the Second) which includes the omitted lines, and which is, overall, a much nicer book -- but, alas, the new edition was essential since so many new asteroids have been found. This edition (the Fourth) has almost twice the number of asteroids (10,666) as are in the Second (5,655), although many of the newer ones are still unnamed. It may well be the last one-volume edition, as more asteroids are being found all the time; or maybe they will go entirely to CD-ROM. The CD-ROM that is included with this book is just the book on CD-ROM, and its design is somewhat lacking. It has a "lite" version which is fairly easily usable (although if you stop a search in the middle, you may have to close the program and re-open it) and a full version, which requires you to download additional software from an internet website in order to use it. It's helpful that the CD has a search feature, so you can search the text of the whole book, but the search feature does not add anything else to the basic text-searching capability -- that is, it doesn't include categories or any other ways to search. For example, if you wanted to find all the asteroids named after musicians, and put "musician" into the search engine, you would miss Segovia, since the text only has "guitarist", and many other musicians for similar reasons; this limitation holds true for all types of searches. If you want a dictionary of minor planet names, this is probably your only choice, and I am glad it exists, and would buy it again -- it is really a great reference, and fascinating for general browsing as well as for astronomical purposes -- but it could definitely stand some improvements.