Thermodynamics of Materials (Mit Series in Materials Science and Engineering)

Rating:
Summary: Inadequate textbook of an already difficult subject matter
Review: As an undergraduate taking a course in thermodynamics of materials, I found the book to be exceedingly brief and, at times, incomprehensible. To those new to thermodynamics, the book is nearly useless. To make it even worse, the book doesn't have answers to the practice questions to allow students to check their work, and it is inadequate as a reference for simple things such as unit conversions.

Rating:
Summary: A good text for graduate courses.
Review: This is a well written book covering topics of relevance to materials. Explanations are concise and so are more digestible for graduate students. The author has taken special care to use clear and definitive notation. There are a few errors - in particular the Ellingham diagram is wrong - the temperature scale should be oC, not K. However, there are fewer errors than many texts I have seen. Each chapter has a good number of nice problems.

Rating:
Summary: Good Intermediate Materials Science Teat
Review: This review refers to Volume I which was I used in a recent graduate materials thermodynamics course. Completing two prior courses in classical thermodynamics oriented towards mechanical engineering and a survey course in Materials Science proved helpful in providing a background for a better understanding the material in this text. However, the basics are developed but in less detail. The text is definitely oriented towards understanding the basics in the application of thermodynamics to materials science and provides reasonable coverage of chemical equilibrium and binary solutions.

The material is developed sequentially so it is best to start at the beginning and work through each section. Fortunately I had access to most of the typographical errors but they do not represent a major hurdle to the basic quality of the theory presented and its understanding. It would have proved useful to the student had the author included answers to selected problems. Overall, I found this to be a good intermediate text.