American civil engineering practice

BOOK NOTES AMERICAN CIVIL ENGINEERING PRACTICE, edited by Robert W. Abbett. Volumes I and II. vp, diagrams, 5½ X 8¼ in. New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1956. Price, $15.00 each volume. The present three-volume reference replaces "American Civil Engineers Handbook," first published in 1910 and edited by Merriman. The replacement is an entirely new, up-to-date reference, serving not only as a handbook, but presenting fundamental principles, procedures and techniques of the entire field of civil engineering. It is designed for use both by professional engineers and engineering students. Each of the three volumes covers one broad aspect of civil engineering and is complete in itself. Volume I contains metropolitan and community planning, surveying, traffic, highways, airports, railroads, soil mechanics and site planning, foundations, earthwork, tunnels and mathematical tables. Volume II covers hydraulic, sanitary and harbor engineering. Volume III will contain masonry, reinforced concrete, steel and timber structures. Each volume has its own index and an ingenious device for locating sections (matching printed bars on the first page with similar ones printed at the beginning of each section). Each of the thirty-four sections comprising the three volumes has been written by an expert and the whole has been skillfully edited by Robert W. Abbett. No civil engineer can afford to overlook this complete, authoritative work in stocking his library. UNIT OPERATIONS OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING, by Warren L. McCabe and Julian C. Smith. 945 pages, diagrams, 6 )< 9 in. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1956. Price, $10.50. This new undergraduate text for juniors and seniors assumes adequate preparation in mathematics, physics, chemistry and mechanics. The text is purposely long, to provide material either for a two-semester or a three-semester course. For the former, the teacher must make his own choice of topics to be omitted. The text covers the standard material for such a course : fluid mechanics, size reduction, 176

mixing, mechanical separations, heat flow, evaporation, gas absorption, distillation, leaching and extraction, crystallization, drying, etc. Space limitations have forced the omission of such topics as adsorption, dialysis, colloid milling, ion exchange, sublimation and other specialized methods. Several appendices contain tables of various properties of liquids, gases and solids; an index completes the volume. Each chapter contains a list of references to recent literature and a list of problems. ELEMENTS OF PURE AND APPLIED MATHEMATICS. 491 pages, 6 X 9 in. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1957. Price,

$7.50. The author of this new text is well qualified to select and present material in pure and applied mathematics, for he has taught college courses for sixteen years and he has also been associated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Motorola Research Laboratory. He is able to judge from practical experience, what to teach students in the way of preparation for engineering careers. Ten chapters, each independent of the others, cover linear equations, vector and tensor analysis, complex variables, differential equations, orthogonal polynomials, Fourier Series, Stleltjes Integrals, Laplace Transforms, calculus of variations, group theory, probability theory and statistics, and real-variable theory. Each section within each chapter has a few problems; there are numerous worked-out examples; and each chapter has a list of references. CHEMICAL PROCESS ECONOMICSIN PRACTICE, edited by J. James Hur. 115 pages, diagrams, 5 >( 7[ in. New York, Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1956. Price, $3.75. The latest addition to the "Experience in Industry" series published by Reinhold records the proceedings of the Fourth Symposium sponsored by the PhiladelphiaWilmington Section of the A I C E and the School of Chemical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. In this small book, nine experts discuss