Customer Reviews

Heat Transfer A Practical Approach

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The book presents the material in an easy to understand manner. The illustrations are superb and the main ideas and relavant equations are highlighted. The book however, contains numerous errors. There are problems at the end of chapters where different numbers are used in the solution than those given in the problem statement. These errors are widespread throughout the text. There are other problems with information given, for example equation 6-48 on page 374 where there are errors in the signs used.

Dr. Cengel presents a balanced coverage of the major topics in heat transfer. He also adds three chapters dealing with practical applications not found in most heat transfer text books. Dr. Cengel also includes numerous practical problems to help the reader learn and understand each concept. The problems are "real-life" in nature which aids the understanding of the more difficult concepts. The one short-fall in this text is that some of the more technical aspects helpful to the professional engineer are lost in the student-friendly translation. The text references the Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software, describe in an Appendix, which provides a useful means for computer analyses of the problems.

This book is very easy to read since it targets undergraduate, mostly sophomore or junior. Cengel tries to explain heat and mass transfer concept using long paragraph to read as an attempt to avoid formula derivation.

This attempt is a horrible approach since students will not truly understand the concepts. Proper derivation should be printed as a mathematical proof/background.

A lot of error in the printing caused the problems inconvenient to solve. The nice feature of this book is that it provides important data in both SI and English units.