The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences

Recommended by Eliezer Yudkowsky (see below).
==Ratings, awards, mentions and recommendations==
===Yudkowsky's recommendation===
====Books of knowledge====
I desperately wanted this book five years before it even existed. It's a good thing that this book was published in 1999, because if I had found this book in 1999 and learned that it had been available since 1994, I would have run amok with a flamethrower.
Somewhere in this book is a short summary of almost every subject in cognitive science that I've ever been interested in. Some hint of the vast depth of the field of cognitive science can be gained by reading an entire book whose concepts are summarized in a two-page article in MITECS, then realizing that MITECS has 471 articles. Not that MITECS is a shallow book: If 90% of the usefulness comes from 10% of the information, then this book tries to give you 40% of the usefulness with 1% of the information, and often succeeds. And MITECS is enormously powerful in combination with Google. MITECS tells you that there's something you need to know about, and Google hunts down online research papers.
The price Amazon currently quotes is $165, but I bought mine for $90 at our local Microcenter. Is it worth it? Definitely. If you want to become a cognitive scientist, there is no other book on Earth that will move you closer to this goal, not even Gödel, Escher, Bach. If you have to choose either a college curriculum in cognitive science or reading MITECS cover to cover, pick MITECS.
=Links and references=
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