Using the HyperTextBook Database

The HyperTextBook database uses a simple yet flexible database engine called (for that reason) flexdb, which was written over a period of years by Paul Kienzle and several others. It has its limitations, as do most things, but it works for us. If you would like your own copy to play with, just ask. For the purposes of this site, here is what you need to know:

Before you click on "FIND" in the ButtonBar or "SEARCH" in the LinkFinder form to initiate a search, be aware of what will happen next: the left frame will be loaded with a list of links decribed by their titles [see below] which you can click on to visit. To go back to the search engine, just hit the LinkFinder button that will appear at the top of the lefthand frame.

The searchable fields in the present (htb) database file are:

The Other Condition(s) field can be arbitrarily intricate, in principle. For example, you might wish to apply the condition

view=biol   hard=0

in all your searches to get only easy material written from a Biologist's viewpoint. Asterisks are "wildcards" - any field containing the specified character string will be matched. Thus a blank entry matches everything, so beware of laziness.

One caveat regarding the search engine: for some reason embedded blanks are not being handled properly, with the result that if you enter "quantum mechanics" (or any other string with an embedded blank) you will match the entire database. Sorry. Use single words only until we cure this bug. It may work to just type in the entire phrase with all the blanks omitted.

Ready to try it out?

Open the HyperTextBook


Jess H. Brewer
Last modified: Thu Aug 19 17:04:07 PDT 1999