It is impossible to understand how a prof can choose this book. I am an grad student and forced to buy this book. This book contains no useful engineering applications whatsoever. It is very confusing and hard to follow. I had to purchase two other thermo books to finally understand what was going on. End of chapter problems are very hard and not enough sample problems. I have too much negative things to say about this book than positive.

It is impossible to understand how a prof can choose this book. I am an grad student and forced to buy this book. This book contains no useful engineering applications whatsoever. It is very confusing and hard to follow. I had to purchase two other thermo books to finally understand what was going on. End of chapter problems are very hard and not enough sample problems. I have too much negative things to say about this book than positive.

Prentice Hall, a more or less new member of the world-wide Pearson Education Group, offers countless texts on thermodynamics at their prenhallDOTcom site. At least five of them feature in the series labelled 'Prentice Hall International Series in the Physical and Chemical Engineering Sciences': BalzhiserSamuelsElliassen1; ElliottLira1; Kyle3; PrausnitzLichtenthalerAzevedo3; TesterModell3. Although you might have put up with it yet (I own four titles from that series.), just to state this irrefutable fact: With regard for the existing competition, the overall book quality, unimaginative content presentation, disorderly, ugly content layout, horridly cheap(!) quality of beige-coloured sheets of paper, amateurish typeset, yuckily yellow hardcover, lack of (online) companion resources, and maybe most of all, the horribly sloppy editorial supervision monitoring (typo-)graphical errors, hardly add to a convincing marketing concept. So this, the beauty of book quality, is not what you pay for or what you get for your two-star bucks. What is left as only, possible decision-maker is the taco bell distillate: the pure, intellectual text content. And letting me anticipate, of all the mentioned yellow fives, this advanced textbook is the only worth talking about contents (ie. dont ever/even bother with the other four yellows. sincerely!). To begin, to quote the preface, "The third edition *now* is intended for a two-semester subject in graduate-level chemical thermodynamics". I am not sure if you got this, so again: as an chemical engineering student (and this text is for ChemE's only. Only.) you usually have passed two standard semesters of thermo (called ENGINEERING thermo; something which virtually *all* eng stud's of diverse fields CivilE, MechE, EnvironE, ChemE etc share. boring and easy stuff) by the end of sophomore's. It is then mandatory for one of your very first junior courses to be *a* semester of 'chemical thermodynamics' which is almost the same as 'chemical engineering thermodynamics'. For the average aspired this is it, not more. Well, sophisticated college of engineering programs do offer additional optional, more-in-depth lower division level thermo courses (=undergrad courses) for your remaining senior years (often called 'Advanced Phase Equilibria Blah-blub'). Now, the world-famous M.I.T., Cambridge MA, goes even further by offering another(!) two, *higher division* level courses in ChemE thermo (theoretically your 5th and 6th thermo-semester!) for its aspiring graduates wow. And the JWTester3 text (?. the book rather appears to constitute a monograph. although with examples and end-of-chapter problems ;-) is to accompany this 1st-gradyear at MIT. Hopefully you are by now in the picture of the MIT situation. Be it as it may, PolingPrausnitzOConnell5 classifies the monumental 942pages-work as "semiadvanced text" whereas Koretsky1 calls it an "advanced text and monograph". Little old me would even title it as "*highly* advanced" without exaggeration. But, and here the wonderful comes, all this hard, high-level, dry theory is wonderfully interconnected with everyday world, experience, love, phenomena, science, technology, ie. not only with the typical, boring MechE or ChemE apparatus, devices and engineering cycles Carnot etc. Where other typical core texts such as Sandler4 or SmithVanness7 limit themselves to engineering applications of immediate engineering interest, Tester3 --a fellow of RReid, JPrausnitz, HVanNess, WDeen, PHarriott, MDuncan-- regards thermodynamics as a global, unifying theory which can be applied to any process, any phenomena, any part of nature, any thing, any time, any system, any subject. And not only standard engineering matter. So Tester's book was not titled 'Chemical thermodynamics and its engineering applications' but 100% appropriately 'Thermodynamics and its applications', since it is about *any* existing thermodynamics (treats and unifies engineering thermo, chemical thermo, chemical engineering thermo, statistical thermo, classical thermo, mathematical thermo and modern thermo) and about *any* application of that colossal theory web to *any* reality in its most general form including all special cases. Isnt this cool? It is! So a great book? Sure, no doubt. The most comprehensive, the only all-round thermo treatment, and also from a modern point of view, Third Edition, and ©1996. And why only a two-star rating? Because the book's usability is limited to a hee itsy-bitsy audience. For the bulk part of ChemE students the entire book, theory, examples, problems and appendices are faaar beyond scope [sic] (Normally, textbooks note in foot notes the contrary [sic!], namely that a mentioned subtopic is "beyond the scope of our text. please refer to the literature, see supplemental reading at the end of this chapter blah-blah"). Not useful and of limited student's practical value: I bet that for 98.5% of the AMAZON.COM users who stumble upon this review of mine the book is not "it", so steer clear of Tester3. For the other 1.5%, be sure you can handle this highly advanced treatment! And also, with the lack of a student's solutions manual or study guide and the lack of Prentice Hall PTR's overall book quality, I would never recommend its purchase. If you need it, borrow a lib copy. But dont buy new! And if you still think of buying, you better wait. It has come to my bad ears that a new edition ©2007 is to be out at the end of 2006. Ten years later, finally. By the by, an exemplary text of more usefulness and practical value to the general ChemE student to accompany the full undergrad higher education is Sandler4, if that is what you are looking for. As to the education at higher division, Tester3 might *well* be the best...because the only ;-P
A last note, a personal. I do like the book, because I do appreciate its completeness, its scope, the many unusual topics treated (much material which i have never seen before or elsewhere. especially not in a book, which calls itself a "text"!), the advanced mathematical level of treatment, the lengthy, overly(!) hard problems, the illustrations, graphs, tables, collections of formulas, the detailed examples, the exact referencing, and the fantastic applications of high-level, dry theory to everyday world. As a gaga fan of thermodynamics science I wish I could exchange my old SmithVanness for a used copy of Tester3. But who wants a SmithVanness copy after having read my review of it? *g* Even if I am interested and find the book highly interesting/fascinating, I would never be willing to pay full price (=brand new copy) for Tester3 nor for Tester4 because of diverse reasons, as mentioned earlier in the whole review. Please also read my other thermo (intro) text reviews at AMAZON.COM for more relevant titles *for you*. You are definitely wrong *here*! (98.5%-probability ;-)

I am taking this course as a graduate student and I have taken three previous courses in Thermodynamics. I know less about this subject and am more confused then I was before I read this book. In my undergraduate degree I did really well in the thermodynamics courses I took and felt like I had a good understanding of the topic. You wouldn't think one book could undo three solid semesters of learning Thermodynamics, but it did for me. The title of this book implies that it is application based, but it is just a pure lie. This book serves the purpose of stroking the ego of professors, and demeaning the moral of the students. I am completely unsatisfied with this book.

I have taken 3 years of thermodynamics with different books. This book being the worst! I felt I 'delearned' after trying to read some of the chapters. The early chapters were good in explaining the basis of thermodynamics. The rest of the book is way too general, the equations are derived for extremely general cases and it makes trying to relate to real world situations near impossible. The problems at the end of the chapters are not easy and there are NO good examples within the chapters. The problems are written poorly and often open to interpretation so students can get 5 or 6 different answers to one problem. If you are forced to use this book I would recommend that you do NOT read the chapters, only work the problems. Buy a different book to study thermodynamics from.