Product Description

This edition acts as an introductory text, simultaneously demonstrating the underlying principles and applicability of thermodynamics to the behaviour of non-metallic materials and to the transformation of metallurgy materials. Normal derivations of thermodynamic equations, whenever possible, are accompanied by derivations which illustrate the thermodynamics of the situation. The order in which material is presented is such that the text maintains a continuity of the development and the use of the principles. In addition, worked examples which illustrate the application of thermodynamics to the consideration of the behavior of materials systems are included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1323761 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Library Binding
• 568 pages

Review
"The long life of this textbook is as good an evaluation of its quality as any book reviewer’s praise. " -- MRS Bulletin, December 2004

'This is an excellent book...it's really what a 'standard' textbook should be: it is detailed, and complete, but builds up from the basics rather than jumping straight in to advanced concepts...I like the iclusion of questions, most importantly, with solutions, and the worked examples are also a valuable resource. Plenty of diagrams for explanations, all clearly referenced and sensibly placed; and there are useful appendices and references.'. Dr. Zoe Barber, Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, UK..
LIBRARY
T...he long life of this textbook is as good an evaluation of its quality as any book reviewer's praise. ...It will remain as a classic for times to come..
-- MRS Bulletin

This is an excellent book...its really what a standard textbook should be: it is detailed, and complete, but builds up from the basics rather than jumping straight in to advanced concepts...I like the iclusion of questions, most importantly, with solutions, and the worked examples are also a valuable resource. Plenty of diagrams for explanations, all clearly referenced and sensibly placed; and there are useful appendices and references.. Dr. Zoe Barber, Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, UK..
LIBRARY
T...he long life of this textbook is as good an evaluation of its quality as any book reviewers praise. ...It will remain as a classic for times to come..
-- MRS Bulletin

About the Author
David R. Gaskell received a B.Sc. in Metallurgy and Technical Chemistry from the University of Glasgow and a Ph.D. from McMaster University. He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and later moved to Purdue University, where he is currently a Professor of Materials Engineering.

Customer Reviews

Materials Science & Metallurgical student from Michigan Tech
Thermodynamics is already a hard enough subject to learn. If you want to learn thermo this is the wrong book for you. Gaskell confused my whole class so much that we hardly even used this book, fortanetly we had a good professor that was able to make sense of what Gaskell had to say. There are so many errors in this book that it is pathetic not just in the answers but also in the tables that Gaskell provides. Gaskell himself came and lectured our class this term. Luckly for him it was early in the term when we were just starting to use the book, if he had came in later in the term he would have been beaten senseless with this horrible book.

Hit and miss
I used this book for my course in Materials Thermodynamics, and I must say that it's got some pretty good material and also some poor parts. In particular Gaskell usually does a good job of explaining his derivations, but there are times when the typographic errors get in the way and you sit there for an hour, until your teacher finally tells you that Gaskell made a mistake.

Another annoyance is that Gaskell's solutions in the back of the book are sometimes wrong, which means that it may be difficult to use a self-teaching book. In addition, Gaskell's solutions to some configurational entropy problems are just completely unconventional and nonsensical from an intuitive standpoint -- my teacher told us to disregard his method entirely.

The text does have some pluses: it has plentiful diagrams, excellent thermodynamic appendicies, and in general does a good job of rigorously explaining every concept. It's definitely not a beginner's book, but Thermodynamics is a complex topic and there are certain assumptions made of the reader in any Thermodynamics textbook.

Loaded with errors
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.