Customer Reviews

Introduction to Hydrology (5th Edition)

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

 

 

Please never ever buy or use this textbook. The authors should be ashamed of themselves for publishing this worthless book. It is sloppiest text book I have ever seen. Ever! This is by far the worst text book I have ever used. And this is not my first go round. I have a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Master of Education. This book has all kinds of issues - one example they have 5280 x 52800 for converting square miles into square feet (really - no one caught that?), other places the authors say they have previously introduced a variable and yet it doesn't show up until 3 pages later, they don't carry units out through the examples, they don't plug the numbers into the equations, and on and on I could complain about this book. Shame on the group I am taking this course through for using this book but shame on Pearson for publishing this book of nonsense. The problems are worded poorly and the ideas in most cases are barely defined but yet you are supposed to figure out how to do the work. Just look at phi index - I had to look it up online (and a ton of other things) to figure out what they were talking about. Nearly all of the problems in the chapter were centered on phi index yet there was only a short worthless description in the book. The fact that it has made it to a fifth edition is amazing to me; had I submitted any of this work to my professors I would have failed every assignment I submitted. It doesn't deserve the one star you are required to give it.

This is possibly the worst textbook I have ever read. There are typos in nearly every chapter and not just grammatical errors, but calculation errors, wrong answers for the homework, equations that are wrong, wrong units in homework problems. I have had to pencil in a dozen corrections, and I'm sure there are errors that I haven't found yet. And this is the Fifth Edition...

Bad Examples. Lots of typos. Hard to follow. I needed this for my engineering hydrology class.. I sold it back at the end of the semester to my book store because I would never see myself looking here for reference. If your professor is requiring this book for your class, I would recommend e-mailing him to ask if there are any other books you could use. For almost every homework, either the TA or the professor had to e-mail us corrections because of the books staggering incoherence. If you are purchasing this because you are looking for a book as a reference or introduction to hydrology, you should probably look elsewhere.

I suppose it would be nice if all engineering texts were as easy to read as the popular novel of the day. Unfortunately, assuming you are a water resource engineer like me, we wade through a topic which is not easily written.

I first used this book during my Masters Degree program. The instructor was not as helpful as I would have liked, but since all of the lectures, homework and tests were pulled from the book, I decided to stop listening and start reading. With a bit of patience, trying to acclimate to the authors' presentation style, I found the book to be helpful.

The description and calculation of Unit-hydrographs, hydrographs and moving between the two was very helpful. Either during, or shortly after taking this course I took the Professional Engineers licensing exam and, to my success, used this book on a couple of questions related to the unit-hydrograph method.

Overall the book deserves 4 stars for being a good place to start. It lacks the final fifth star because it does get a little confusing as the authors attempt to explain many more competing approaches than they should have. There were also a couple of errors in the calculations used as examples, which had me scratching my head for a while. The good thing is that the description of the methods shown in the examples was correct, so whoever created the examples did not follow the direction properly a couple of times.

I recommend this book for anyone trying to study for the P.E. exam, or as a desk reference at work when you want to know what your hydrology software is doing.

This book is a VERY difficult read. Not only do you need to try and understand the concepts of hydrology but you must also attempt to navigate your way through a confusing maze of "wording" that could easily have been more understandable.