Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering: An Integrated Approach

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't buy it unless your professor requires it. It is extremely frustrating because there is very brief explanation of a subject and then the problems expect you to have in-depth knowledge. /you will waste a lot of time hunting for information that isn't even there.

In order to understand the material presented in this book, you will need to hunt online for clarification or find a better book. Half of the problems are based on reading tiny diagrams that are impossible to read to the level of accuracy you need to answer the problems.

Some of the qualitative explanation is OK, but you really need a better resource for quantitative analysis.

My son is interested in blacksmithing. He's a freshman in high school and we homeschool. I wanted to teach him about crystal structure and how temperature and processing affect the final product. This is an excellent text for this purpose. We skip all the math and focus on the concepts. Later, if he's truly interested, we can go back to this text and delve deeper into the concepts and calculations. I'm delighted!

This book covers tons of material. It was part of 2 classes I took, and I've referred to it in several others. It has content on almost everything that will be covered in an undergraduate materials science program, then a little bit more. The amount of coverage it gives for each topic though varies quite a bit. I found its discussion on the various microstructures of steel very useful on multiple occasions. The section on fracture though left a little bit to be desired, the section discussing brittle fracture is only about half a page. It tries to condense what would probably be 3 or 4 whole chapters in a mechanical properties textbook (on fracture, fatigue, creep, impact testing, stress concentration) into a single 50 page chapter. Overall though, I found it to be a good intro textbook and a good reference for concepts.

The text is somewhat confusing. The diagrams are too small and any attempt to magnify results in grainy pictures. Additionally the lack of page numbers makes it difficult to follow along with a class. Locations do not help at all. The formatting seems to be off and can lack cohesiveness unless you can compare it to the hard-copy version.

When I began my undergraduate studies in Materials Science and Engineering, this was the book that was required. It's since been a great companion through (almost) all of my undergraduate courses, and is an extremely handy reference as a graduate student. I also had the pleasure of TAing for a section of our Intro. to Materials course this term, and I have some observations about this text. I hope that the publishers and authors work on some of the issues below in the fifth edition (since the fourth doesn't seem to have changed much/any from what I have seen so far).

PROS
1. Great text and figures: the text is highly readable and does a good job of placing nuances of certain equations and figures in plain sight (e.g. the conditional definition of "a" is clearly visible near the fracture toughness equation, etc.).
2. Great introductory/refresher level in ALL areas: the authors avoid giving "special treatment" to their pet subjects like many authors do in other undergraduate texts.
3. Good binding, construction, and paper. (Although this particular "pro" might be a "con" to some, see point #5.)

CONS
4. Problems can use a little bit of actual thought before the fifth edition instead of simply rearranging them (again): one of the largest problems with this text is the overuse of tiny figures in the homework. This makes life miserable as a student (trust me, I remember this clearly), and, amazingly, even MORE hellish as a TA and grader. Do the publishers honestly think that students will turn in scanned/printed figures with homework? Of course not! In the 21st century, I would think that there would be a clever way to make access to figures easier, like including them on the (otherwise pretty useless) CD. This pretty much my only problem with this text.

OTHER THOUGHTS
5. The cost for a new edition of this is well worth it for an undergraduate materials science student or graduate student preparing for a qualifier. HOWEVER, this is NOT the target audience in real life. Instead, this text is bought and sold quite frequently by mechanical engineers and biomedical engineers who have no interest in hanging onto a book that is worth a month's rent. Could the publishers consider a paperback (or other lower-cost) edition for those folks who don't actually care to hang onto this text?

I just want to warn you that the kindle version is flawed. In many cases the graphics in this book are impossible to make out on the kindle screen, and increasing the font size does not help since they are embedded images, not text. This is true for most of the important equations throughout the book. The images show up better on the "Kindle for PC" application, but they are still pretty small.

I usually like kindle books for various reasons, but in this case I would recommend a real copy. I chose to give two stars since it is convenient to be able to search the textbook, and of course it is much easier to haul around than the full sized book. And cheaper.

Well i am a chemical engineer student and this book form part of many of my other long and complicated books. Anyway the book its not the best I've read, altough i have to say that I read worst. So overall is a decent book.
It does explain the material fairly, but what it has in theory it lacks in good exercises. The problems are hard to solve. They are not similar to the example problems therefore it is almost impossible to solve the homework. In my class we posses the solution manual and even with the solutions it is very hard to understand. Basically the theory they cover does always help to solve the exercises.
I recommend this book if you only seek to know more about the subjects since it explains the molecule interactions in detail and has good pictures that help visualize the material. But it is not a good introductory book

This text is great. It explains material science as simply as possible. This text is excellent, and is easy to read.

The chapters contain the same material to new editions. HOWEVER, page numbers don't match up all the time and questions are sometimes different.
This book was good enough for me to use it as a Teaching Assistant for the class.

This book was required for a class of mine, and I got it both cheaper and nicer here. I'm 100% satisfied!