GUIDEBOOK FOR WASTE AND SOIL REMEDIATION: FOR NON-HAZARDOUS PETROLEUM AND SALT-CONTAMINATED SITES
George H. Holliday and Lloyd E. Deuel, Jr. ASME Press, Three Park Ave., New York, NY 10016-5990. 2009. 210 pages. $88 member, $110 list. ISBN: 978-0-7918-0277-9.

Soil science is rarely a glamorous topic. It’s usually the province of agricultural extension agents and landscapers. But in this book, George Holliday and Lloyd Deuel apply this knowledge base to cleaning up oil field sites. The result is a comprehensive guide to environmental remediation on such sites, starting with a review of different types of soils and continuing to discussions of various chemical analyses, applicable state laws, and the pros and cons of a number of different methods for disposing of the residue. The book is also chock full of tables and charts, formulas, and time-tested criteria with the intention that the reader will be able to apply these directly to situations encountered in the field. Holliday and Deuel have included an extensive set of test problems at the end of the book to enable the reader to verify that he has understood the material presented.

METALWORKING SINK OR SWIM
Tom Lipton. Industrial Press Inc., 989 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10018. Softcover. 314 pages. $44.95. ISBN 978-0-8311-3362-7.

The subtitle to Tom Lipton’s Metalworking Sink or Swim is “Tips and Tricks for Machinists, Welders, and Fabricators.” Lipton, who describes himself as “a career metalworker,” claims that he learned to weld at the age of nine. The author’s tips include pointers for working with various types of machines—a chapter each to manual lathes and to manual milling machines, followed by chapters on CNC versions. He also writes about the fundamentals of setting up a shop (including the food prep and eating areas). Lipton’s advice is not limited to tool use. Matters of thinking and communication (like leaving a brief note when you turn a job over to someone else) rank high enough to make chapter two, which is titled “Brain Food.” This is a book told from the metalworker’s perspective, and engineers may find the most instructive passages are those in which the author talks about good and bad experiences in working with engineers and scientists.

ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS MATERIALS AND CHEMICALS PROCESSING
Myer Kutz. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 111 River St., Hoboken, NJ 07030. 2007. 466 pages. $120. ISBN 978-0-471-73904-3.

The third volume of the Wiley Series in Environmentally Conscious Engineering, this volume offers state-of-the-art approaches for planning, designing, and implementing environmentally friendly material and chemical processing systems. The logical organization is designed to take the reader from evaluating environmental hazards of industrial materials and chemicals to assessing the economics of environmental improvement projects. Hands-on experts discuss a range of industrial materials, including metals, chemicals, plastics, and packaging materials. Coverage includes the extraction, production, and recycling of metals, as well as methods for reducing waste and preventing pollution in chemical plants.

ESSENTIALS OF MECHANICAL STRESS ANALYSIS
Amir Javidinejad. Self-published. 2008. Softcover. 236 pages. $60. ISBN: 978-0-615-24764-9.

Amir Javidinejad is an independent consultant specializing in finite element analysis and structural stress analysis, who has worked in the field as an employee or as a contractor for a number of large engineering companies. According to Javidinejad, “I used to teach at Purdue University, and I saw the need to write a textbook for college and also a reference book for engineers.” That is what Essentials of Mechanical Stress Analysis sets out to do. The text is divided into 13 chapters dealing with various subjects, including beam analysis theory, plate analysis theory, elastic stability and buckling, and fatigue. The index is brief—less than a page—but the table of contents is fairly detailed with numerous subdivisions of chapters, which can help those using the book as a reference work. The typeface, however, is very small and sustained reading may require a magnifier to avoid eyestrain in more mature readers. The book is available through Amazon.com.

HANDBOOK OF FOURIER ANALYSIS AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Robert J. Marks II. Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016-4308. 2009. 808 pages. $150. ISBN: 978-0-19-533592-7.

Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor University, tells us that his handbook is directed more to engineers and scientists than to mathematicians. He starts by giving us an idea of the broad applications of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s idea of breaking down signals into sinusoidal components, and an idea, too, of the author’s aim to be thorough. We weren’t sure if Marks was being scrupulously thorough or light-hearted in the opening to his introduction. He starts with “an incomplete list” of technical fields that have applied Fourier analysis, and then adds almost a dozen and a half terms that carry the thinker’s name. The paragraph runs to 19 lines and we counted about 90 citations from his list of reference works. The handbook’s chapter titles include “Fourier Transforms in Probablility, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes” and “Generalizations of the Sampling Theorem.” The sampling theorem, Marks explains, “tells us how fast to sample an audio waveform to make a discrete time CD or an image to make a DVD.” Marks warns his reader that the book may be incomplete. “No single volume can present all of the applications for Fourier’s theory,” he writes, because the material “is simply too voluminous.” But he gives it a try.

A COMPENDIUM OF PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION MODELS: METHOD OF LINES ANALYSIS WITH MATLAB
William E. Schiesser and Graham W. Griffiths. Cambridge University Press, 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013. 2009. 490 pages. $99. ISBN 978-0-521-51986-1.

The authors, William Schiesser, a professor of chemical engineering and mathematics at Lehigh University, and Graham Griffiths, a visiting professor at City University London and a principal consultant with Honeywell Systems, apply Matlab code and a mathematical procedure called the Method of Lines (MOL) to solve the equations that constitute mathematical models of engineering systems. The MOL method algebraically approximates boundary value partial derivatives, and so reduces partial differential equations to ordinary differential equations. According to the authors, the reduction makes the code easy to understand, implement, and modify.  The application of the Method of Lines in physics and engineering is shown in chapters on the Korteweg-de Vries, Navier-Stokes and Maxwell’s equations, and elsewhere. Additional information and Matlab downloads are available from http://www.pdecomp.net.