Separation Process Principles

Rating:
Summary: incredibly thorough, but difficult to wade through
Review: As my professor for this class put it, "the good news is that this book is incredibly thorough. the bad news is that it's incredibly thorough." tough for an introductory text on the subject, mainly because the notation is different from most other books i've used, and the style of writing is not quite as straightforward as could be hoped. if i could add one thing to this book, it would be a general overview in each chapter -- the authors just jump into each topic without introducing the bigger picture, so it's easy to wonder "why are we doing this calculation?" then again, maybe a professor could take that role during lecture. as another reviewer noted, this book does have an excellent review of thermo and mass transfer; it was only during this class that i started to really understand these two subects in any kind of depth.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best
Review: I was really excited to sell my book back once the course was over for this one. It is a really difficult book to read both to understand and to follow in any continuous sequence (I did pass, though with a decent grade). Several problems are quite confusing, especially in chapter 7 (many students had to see the teacher for clarification). It does give you some HYSYS/Aspen problems to work, which is nice.

Rating:
Summary: Horrid Book
Review: This was our undergrad text. Like a previous reviewer, I couldn't wait to sell it back to the bookstore. I found that my prof was assigning homework from another text, which he felt was a better book (the department chose the book, not him). When I tried to look information up in the book, I would spend hours hunting because it was spread out so much. Even the index didn't help much; one topic would be listed in several different locations. Not only would you quickly discover that this topic wasn't helping you, half the time you couldn't figure out where they put what you were hunting for.

I'll admit that I didn't read the whole book. I didn't read most of it. This is really unusual for me, as I almost always learn more and better from the text than the lectures. I learn by reading the material, not hearing it. The poor quality of this book made the class that much more difficult. The only time anyone in class resorted to using the text rather than our class notes was during tests. It was definately the worst ChemE book I was required to buy.