Comment on recently published book about oemof

Recently a book about oemof [1] has been published. As explicitly stated by the author, this book is not written by the oemof community. Generally, books about software can be a good source to give newcomers a comprehensive view of a field and show how the software can be used to approach problems in that field. In this sense, they can fulfill a purpose that goes beyond what can be reached by the documentation written by the programmers.

However, this book stays rather close to the code and much of the information provided is outdated or not presented correctly. We do not see the advantages that a book with a more general approach could have, but we do see the risk of getting a wrong picture of oemof. So, we dissociate ourselves from the book as a primary source of information and recommend consulting the documentation instead.

The documentation is run by the community and kept up-to-date with the developing code. Therefore it contains the most recent, detailed and complete information on how to use and develop oemof, and we strongly recommend to read it. If there is anything missing or you have suggestions on how to improve the docs, you are very welcome.

[1] Nagel, J. (2018). Optimization of Energy Supply Systems: Modelling, Programming and Analysis (Vol. 69). Springer.

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