Customer Reviews

The chemical reactor omnibook

5 star:		(1)
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This might be the only engineering text you'll ever see that is HAND-LETTERED! Yes, Octave Levenspiel's famously neat handwritting is present on almost every page, and that includes the graphs and figures. Besides the novelty value, the Omnibook is a fairly decent reference book. Don't try to learn reaction engineering from this book alone; equations and concepts are simply applied and are not derived or developed in any way whatsoever. This can lead to some confusion if you haven't brushed up recently on the basic concepts. If you know the concepts but can't exactly remember how to apply them, then it works great. It also makes a fine supplement to either Levenspiel's _Chemical Reaction Engineering_ or the (slightly superior, in my opinion) _Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering_ by Fogler.

You will not find a better buy for $30.

All text and diagrams are handwritten and are centered around showing the reader what questions to ask. You will be hard pressed to find a more intuitive and essential start to learning about different methods of chemical conversion.

I think the Omnibook is a great text, very clear and very helpful in a subject that can be overwhelming (for me, at least). I love that it is hand written and full of diagrams.

Unfortunately, my copy of this book seemed to be missing chapters. My classmates all had different editions of the book, and theirs seemed to have more chapters that my book skipped over entirely. If I had to do it again, I'd just pay full price at the campus bookstore to get the complete version.