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Rating: 
Summary: This is a new edition
Review: First, who is Robert R. Rice? As I understand it, Dr. Gaskell, wrote the book himself - Robert Rice is a non-entity. Second, all of the reviews for this edition ( the fourth) refer to the third edition. All of the errors found in the third edition have been corrected in the fourth edition.
Rating:
Summary: best materials thermo book available....
Review: Gaskell is a critical component to the library of any Materials Scientist. Study it once, study it twice, and then pull it off the shelf often during your professional career. A solid professor can highlight the most critical components of the text.
Rating: 
Summary: Loaded with errors
Review: I used this book (fourth edition) in a graduate level thermo course and found the errors so numerous that it was absolutely frustrating trying to make sense of an already difficult subject. The one good thing about the book is that Gaskell offers many worked examples (unfortunately the errors in the examples make many of them quite confusing).
I find it ironic that the preface reads "The fourth edition...is different from the third...[in that] there is an acute emphasis on typographical and mathematical accuracy." If this is the case I would have hated to have used the third addition.
Rating: 
Summary: His other thermo books are bad, so is this one
Review: Like others have said before me, thermodynamics is hard enough without Gaskell's weak attempts to make it even harder. He has the ability to make the difficult the uncomprehendable. I wouldn't use any of his books if they were given to me.
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Summary: Materials Science & Metallurgical student from Michigan Tech
Review: This is garbage for two main reasons. First, this book is full of errors! Ok, so what's the big deal about having errors? To some people, like some thermodynamics professors, they are nothing that needed to be worried about. (I guess some of you can refer to it!) But to the students, errors are bad news because they cause confusions and misconceptions to students, especially when Gaskell made mistakes on equations or formulars. Students can spend a lot of time trying to make sense out of Gaskell's mistakes! That's absolutely terrible. Secondly, Prof. Gaskell has the habit to write very, very, very long sentences. In this book it is not uncommon to find long sentences that consisted of more than 50 words. When a sentence is as long as a paragraph I don't think there are many readers (at least not the PhD students I knew) who can comprehend what it is trying to say. At the end, nothing is learned but only the readers' time, energy, and money are wasted. I really don't know what Prof. Gaskell thinks of his own writing style. The way I see it is that the author was trying hard to make his book sounded elegant and high class, however, failed. This book is not good for any body who wants to learn thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is itself a very difficult subject to be learned. So when it is taught through a book that's full of errors and hard to be comprehended as well, then how much thermodynamics can students possibly learn? It's my opinion that any professor who decided to use this as a textbook and requires students to buy it has no concern of his/her students' quality of education. I feel that any professor who is willing to open the book and spend some time to check it out will find this book is just a waste of student's money.
Rating:
Summary: His other thermo books are bad, so is this one
Review: This is not a good book. It's full of errors. Of course, the other thermo books out there (DeHoff, Lupis, Swalin) are much worse. At least Gaskell's explainations make a little sense. Read this book for the concepts; read another when you want accurate equations, graphs and tables.
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