It is hoped that this GATEWAY TO ENGINEERING will assist newcomers in finding their way around the the world of engineering on the Internet. You might consider bookmarking this Gateway at once. The opinions and advice on offer are intended to be generally useful to engineers and do not merely promote the products of one company unless that company has something uniquely useful.
We begin with some general libraries for you to look at. You can also find information on agriculture in these libraries:
In Yahoo, there is also a Business Section, with a subsection on Companies, and a sub-subsection on Engineering Companies.
Some specialist libraries are:
In some other subjects, such as physics and astronomy, you will find monolithic specialist services such as TIPTOP or PhysLINK (for physicists) or Astroweb (for astronomers). There does not seem to be any instant obvious equivalent of these in engineering, probably because of the greater diversity of the subject. We advise you to become proficient in the use of general-purpose search engines to answer specific queries. The author habitually uses MetaCrawler for searching, and regularly re-submits his own website to Infoseek and AltaVista to keep it in the public eye. This is an example for you to follow.
Conversely, if you have a website of your own to promote, then it is recommended that you submit it to general-purpose search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista. Specialist search engines for engineering will surely emerge in the future, but don't rely on them too much just yet.
The author's favourite general-purpose single search engine is Infoseek, and AltaVista also warrants a mention. If you are setting up a website, publicise it first in Infoseek and AltaVista in that order.
Other well-known search engines are Excite, HotBot, Lycos and WebCrawler.
MetaCrawler is a search engine which does not maintain a database itself, but instead passes your enquiry to other search engines and collates the results. It does a good job of collation and eliminating rubbish. Note that Yahoo can also offer a tour of the major search engines, but you have to push the buttons yourself.
Advertisement: Click here to read about the author's recommended best practice on search engines.
You can find out about Internet news groups in DejaNews. You can find software in SoftSeek.
Scientific American is a well-known U.S. monthly science magazine published in several languages and normally available anywhere in Great Britain, for example.
New Scientist is a British science weekly.
The connection to engineering may be tenuous, but we'll give NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a mention.
NCSA is the United States' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, best known for producing the Mosaic web browser. This is a big website.
Alexander Smits' list of fluid dynamics material has plenty of general-interest links in addition.
There is a companion GATEWAY TO PHYSICS from which this page is derived.
This page has a subsidiary page of links where you can find how to obtain things like web browsers and PKZIP. Click here to go to it.
All the hotlinks on this page are expanded in their full form to enable you to pass it around as a Local File. This page is subject to continual revision, so if you received it as a Local File, you can get an up-to-date version by clicking here. Remember that you may have to re-bookmark the up-to-date version and delete the old bookmark.
All the above information is intended to be generally useful to engineers. Distinctive opinions may be expressed, but they are not related to the promotion of the products of the sponsor, Anima Technical Computing. So now here is ...
Anima Technical Computing produces a range of software to teach engineering subjects such as CNC programming, robotics, hydraulics and pneumatics. Click here to go to our home page. We see it as in our strategic interest to promote worldwide access to the Internet. Initially we will be mailing engineering departments in universities and college thoughout the world to tell them about this GATEWAY TO ENGINEERING as a public good.
