Introduction to Thermodynamics, Classical and Statistical, 3rd Edition

Rating:
Summary: The Best of Ternodynamics
Review: Is a book wich explain detaily, all the laws on termodynamics, has a very good examples and excercises. Another issue, it works on International systems Units, and is very good because the world is changing for using that units on all the industries, it has conversion factor for English and metrics units. I recommend it as the best book for the begining on Termodynamic studies.

Rating:
Summary: Good reference book, but a horrible textbook
Review: This book is currently used in my Engineering Thermodynamics course, and is due to be phased out in favor of another textbook beginning in 2004. The authors of this text, Dr. Sonntag and Dr. Van Wylen, seem to know their stuff; however, they have not done a good job of writing a textbook that a typical engineering student can learn from.

The entire book is black and white text, with a few mediocre drawings, and a minimal number of worked example problems--some chapters do not have a single example problem. The few example problems that are given are usually solved by skipping most of the critical steps. The authors seem to assume that readers will be doing most of the complex calculations in their heads.

What is most annoying, however, is that for many of the book's end-of-chapter problems, the authors have not shown how to solve them anywhere within the chapter. Once again, the authors may have assumed that only geniuses would be reading their text and that they should be able to derive the necessary equations completely unaided by sample problems, illustrations, or other learning aids.

In short, I feel sorry for any full-time student who is forced to learn thermodynamics from this textbook.

For learning thermodynamics, I think "Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics" by Michael Moran and Howard Shapiro is a much better choice. It has plenty of explanatory graphs and illustrations (in color even), as well as numerous worked examples. Dr. Sonntag and Dr. Van Wylen, are you paying attention?

I give this book 2 stars overall.
As a reference book, I give it 4 stars.
As a book to learn thermodynamics from, I give it 1 star.