Our country is an ancient civilization with a long history. Since the existence of writing, we have accumulated rich cultural classics.Especially after our ancestors invented paper, engraving printing and movable type printing, China's cultural undertakings have developed by leaps and bounds, and there are so many books of all kinds.These classics concentratedly reflect the splendor of Chinese culture.They are the condensation of the wisdom of the Chinese nation, the crystallization of knowledge, and have become the precious cultural heritage of our country. We know that books can be divided into two categories from the perspective of use, one is for knowledge or appreciation, we need to read carefully from beginning to end; reference book.A reference book is a book compiled in a specific format and retrieval method.This kind of book is often used by people in studying or doing scientific research, just as people cannot do without necessary tools in production or other activities.In addition, there are many tomes in ancient books in our country, which are not reference books in themselves, but because the tomes are too large, people are generally not required to read them from the beginning to the end, and often use them to check the materials. Therefore, they also have the nature of reference books.This kind of book is between reading and review, which is usually called "data book"; now people call these books "generalized reference book".In foreign countries, some people call it "marginal reference book".

There are many types of reference books and reference books in a broad sense, which cannot be fully introduced in this booklet.Now I will only select the class books, political books and series books to explain, because after all, they are all colorful flowers in the colorful cultural classics of our country, and they all shine their own light in the cultural history of our country.