mechanical

I thought this was a very well written, organized book. The concepts were explained very clearly. It was great to finally find an understandable book on this subject; other thermo/fluids books that I have read haven't been as informative and comprehendable.

One of the drawbacks, however, was the fact that the examples presented within the book were very simple and didn't cover the concepts in as much depth as I had hoped. Many complex topics that were in the questions at the end of the chapter hadn't been covered well enough in the preceding text to allow them to be both solved AND understood. Furthermore, there were some thermo/fluid topics that weren't covered in the book at all that I thought should have been (compressible flow, for example). As a result, when I took the course in college, my professor had to print out pages from other thermo books to compensate for this.

Despite this, however, there were many pictures that accompanied the examples and again, as stated above, it was easy to understand. I was very impressed with that, given the abstractness of the subject, and the difficulty that other authors have had explaining it effectively.

The bottom line: It was a great book to learn about the fundamentals. I suppose, according to the title, it has served its purpose. However, if you want to go into depth with this subject, go elsewhere.

I will begin with the good things. This book contains a LOT of information. The tables are very extensive, and the subject matter is very broad. The derivations are generally easy to follow and I found the text itself even enjoyable to read at times. These things upped my opinion of the book from one star to two. However, the example problems are generally not sufficient to help with the far more complex problems in the back of the chapters. As a further frustration, only about a sixth of the problems include the solutions. The end result is that for a homework one is left leafing through the book in a futile search for more extensive guidance on the very extensive problems, all the while not knowing if you didn't mess up the problem already in the first calculation you made. For example, I have this textbook for my second course in fluid dynamics. For my first homework, I had a three day weekend to complete 3 problems. 30+ work hours later (and one shot weekend) I have no idea if I'm right on the first one and I'm still stuck on the last one. I dislike having to go to reciation, so it's not unusual for me to spend lots of time on problems and reading the book in order to figure out the homeworks on my own. But this book is quite frankly kicking my arse. Considering that this is my second fluids course (I'm an aerospace eng student) you would think I would be better at fluids. However, my first fluids textbook was also a Cengel book, and that book was next to useless as well. My overall conclusion: A great book for reading and catching derivations with lots of good tables and a wide array of topics. But it's a huge frustration waiting to happen if you plan on working the problems/preparing for an exam.

I am currently taking an introductory course in thermodynamics. I find this book to be a very interesting read. The book uses both SI units and Imperial units, which at times seem very confusing. There is a lot of information on this book, thus this book is a good starting point to learn about thermodynamics.