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Rating: 
Summary: Formalism
Review: Best treatment of extensive, intensive variables, thermodynamic potentials thermodynamic stability. I relied on the first edition of this text, along with other texts, for years while teaching thermo and stat mech. However, I preferred Gibbs's original argument for proving the equivalence of energy minimun at constant entropy to entropy maximum at constant energy. The book's weakness is that a student can learn everything in it without being able to apply the subject in the laboratory (some of the exercises are good in this regard, though). The opposite can be said about Zemansky. Forget Reif, a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas unsystematically organized and presented.
Rating: 
Summary: Right book, wrong edition...
Review: The book gets five stars, but with the one caveat that this applies only to the first edition and not the second. Callen's book was the first to really push the axiomatic approach to classical thermodynamics, and the quality of the pedagogy on the subject prior to the emergence of the original version of this text in 1960 was, shall we say, "lacking." That said, actually spending money on the portion of this book devoted to statistical mechanics, when there are significantly clearer and cheaper presentations to be found (such as that by Chandler), is a little silly. The best thing about the introduction of new editions, however, is that they frequently drive down the price of the old - one can now easily find used, hardcover copies of the original version of this text for significantly less than half the cost of the new edition.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful Postulational Approach to Thermodynamics
Review: Why did I buy an older thermodynamics text, one first published in 1960? I trust the advice of other Amazon reviewers. They say: 1) The best treatment of classical thermodynamics that I have seen. The chapters on phase transitions are excellent and the mechanical model used to illustrate critical phenomena is brilliant. 2) It is far better than most books on the subject. 3) I think this book has no competition as a text in thermodynamics. It is the ideal preparation for a book like Landau's Statistical Physics. 4) The overview of the fundamentals of thermodynamics is without rival. 5) I think this book is a great option if you feel disappointed with the standard treatment of thermodynamics, which to me is quite boring and clumsy. A few reviewers argued that Callen's text was less suitable for engineering students (too few heat-mechanical energy conversion problems) and chemical engineers (too few chemical mixture problems). I agree with the majority. Thermodynamics, an Introduction to the Physical Theories of Equilibrium Thermostatics and Irreversible Thermodynamics, is an exceptional text. I give it five stars. H. B. Callen offers a fascinating and insightful postulational approach to thermodynamics rather than the conventional inductive approach. He targets first year graduate students and advanced undergraduates; however, even readers proficient with advanced thermodynamics should find Callen's approach stimulating. The text has three primary sections: General Principles of Classical Thermodynamics (200 pages), Representative Applications (65 pages), and Fluctuations and Irreversible Thermodynamics (50 pages). An extensive appendix, some 50 pages, offers a useful review of pertinent mathematics and other relevant topics. Answers are not provided to the chapter problems. Interspersed throughout are brief chapters that review useful mathematical techniques. I appreciated the discussions of the Euler equation, the Legendre transformations, the extremum principle in the Legendre transformed representations, and the Maxwell relations (not the Maxwell EM equations). Callen provides useful tools like a thermodynamic mnemonic diagram (first introduced by Max Born) and associated procedures for reducing the formal manipulation of partial derivates to "a simple recipe". Callen's text has been widely used. I reviewed the 1960 first edition, eighteenth printing. A second edition published in 1984 is easier to find and is often used today as a supplementary text. Thanks again for the advice from previous reviewers.
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