Fundamentals of Physical Acoustics

Book review: Fundamentals of Physical Acoustics D.T. Blackstock; Wiley & Sons Ltd, New York, 2000, 541 pages, ISBN 0-471-3197This book is an excellent piece of work. The text is extremely clear and goes a long way towards meeting the declared pedagogical target. The author has written a comprehensive text. The proportions of equations and explanations/interpretations are particularly well balanced. Throughout the book, the context and the validity domain for any equation derived are clearly stated. No doubt this book will be of invaluable help for students, academics and engineers. The structure of the book has a peculiar recursive pattern. Several topics are treated in each chapter, but these topics are the main subjects themselves of subsequent chapters (which can sometimes be found after several intermediate chapters).Althoughthismeans that the author returns to a subject more than once, no impression of redundancy comes out from the reading. This is due to a careful choice of the examples and the different angles from which the problems are viewed. The way in which the book is structured has a beneficial effect and undoubtedly participates in enhancing the pedagogical content. Essentially, each subject is treated in detail several times, thus giving the readerthe opportunity to assimilate the concepts while still progressing in their discovery. Moreover the presentation and the layout of the book are excellent