The PVCDROM is viewed with a web browser and the Shockwave plugin. Most computers come with the software already installed and ready to go. The PVCDROM will work on any Windows computer from 95 on but it is advisable to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer. To check if shockwave is installed go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/
The Shockwave player takes a while to load the first time but is much faster once it is in memory.
If you do not have Shockwave installed, you need to download it for free from the Internet.
Unfortunately Shockwave is not available for Linux.
Most computers already have Java installed. If not, you can get the latest version at www.java.com/getjava/
To watch movies from the google video you will need the latest version of flash player installed (Presently version 9)
To read the pages as you would a book, click the buttons "Next" or "Prev" at the top or use the buttons that appear under the navigation menu. You can use the standard browser Forward and Back buttons to go to pages you have already seen.
The use of frames causes is fine for a CDROM but causes problems with bookmarking on the webedition. To bookmark an individual page, right-click on the right hand frame and from the pop-up context menu in:
On the left side of the page is a table of contents. Click on the chapter headings to see the contents of a chapter. Click again to collapse the chapter and just show the heading. To see the entire table of contents click on Expand All. To go back to just the chapter headings, click on collapse all.
To jump to any page just click on it. Sub-headings are in red text and are
not links. You can also adjust the amount of space given to the table of contents
by dragging the frame boundary. An orange (
)ball
shows the current page.
Spread throughout the document are mini-calculators for the equations in the text. Enter numbers in the blue fields. The results are displayed in the yellow fields and update automatically as the inputs change.
Enter very large or very small numbers using the standard exponential notation. For example, 1 000 000 (106) is entered as 1e6.
Press F11 to make Internet Explorer fill the screen. As some of the animations are quite large, set the screen resolution to at least 1024 x 768.
The basic font size is set by the browser preferences. If you wish to change your font size click View-->Text Size.
References are viewed by rolling the mouse over (Ref)