Anil Kumaer Sinha
McGraw Hill

At well over 1000 pages of text, diagrams and photographs this is a massive work covering diffusion, solidification, deformation, annealing, surface modification and the impact of each. Sadly there is little to offer the soldering engineer, as the book has been enlarged from the original Ferrous Physical Metallurgy with little mention of solder for obvious reasons. I still feel the title was a little misleading.

One of the other issues is there is little coverage on the preparation of samples, etching and examination which surprised me. However, when asking other metallurgists it was felt that this may be too basic for a book of this type. Although there were some good example images there were too few, to me the key aspect is how to recognise different structures and their impact.

I found the different methods of material treatment and secondary treatments very interesting. The benefits of additions to different alloys is covered and the pros and cons of these changes. The text is expanded from the original and, with so many references, the reader can easily delve to a far deeper level on any of the subject.

This book is for the metallurgist not the casual reader.