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Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering is an alternate version of my text, Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction, Fifth Edition. The content of both is the same, but the order of presentation differs, and Fundamentals uses newer technologies to improve teaching and learning Regarding the order of presentation, there are two common approaches to teaching materials science and engineering: one that I call the “traditional” approach and the other that most refer to as as the “”integrated”” approach. With the traditional approach, the structures/characteristics/properties of metals are first presented, followed by a similar discussion of ceramic materials and polymers. Introduction, Fifth Edition is organized this way, which is preferred by many teachers of materials science and engineering.With the integrated approach, a particular structure, characteristic, or property is presented for t three types of materials before moving on to the discussion of another structure/characteristic/property.
This is the order of presentation in Fundamentals. Probably the most common criticism of college textbooks is that they are too long. With the most popular texts, the number of pages often increases with each new edition. This leads teachers and students to complain that it is impossible to cover all the topics in the text in one term. After wrestling with this concern (trying to decide what to remove without limiting the value of the text), we decided to split the text into two components. The first is a set of “core” topics: sections of the text that are covered most frequently in a course of introductory materials, and second, “supplementary” topics, sections of the text that are covered less frequently. In addition, we chose to provide only the core topics in print, but the full text (both core and supplementary topics) is available on the CD-ROM that is included with the print component of Fundamentals. Decisions about which topics to include in print and which to include only on the CD-ROM were based on the results of a recent survey of instructors and confirmed in development reviews. The result is a printed text of approximately 525 pages and an interactive electronic text on the CDROM, which consists, in addition to the full text, of a large number of additional resources, including interactive software modules, as explained below. The text of the CD-ROM with all its various links is navigated with Adobe Acrobat. These links within the interactive eText include the following: (1) from the table of contents to selected eText sections, (2) from the index to selected topics within the eText, (3) from the reference to a figure, table or equation in one section to the actual figure/table/equation in another section (all figures can be enlarged and printed), (4) from the Important Terms and Concepts at the end of the chapter to their definitions within the chapter, (5) from terms in bold in the text to their corresponding definitions/explanations in the glossary, (6) from references in the text to the corresponding appendices, (7) from some end-of-chapter problems to your answers, (8) give some answers to your solutions, (9) from software icons to the corresponding interactive modules, and (10) from the opening welcome screen to the support website
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