Reddit mentions: The best material science books

If you like the online course lectures, you should definately look at those. I know tons of great schools such as Yale, UCLA, MIT, Stanford etc. etc. offer full lecture series on youtube. Usually the syllabi are online for you to look at so you can get a feel for it.

I am more of a book learner myself so I will try to make some recommends, but when looking for books try googling, reading stackexchange posts and Amazon reviews.

I'm going to disagree with /u/Orion952 on Fraleigh's book, its an alright book but I have seen much better. For Abstract Algebra, I would recommend Nicholson's book. Its a very gentle introduction to the subject. There are lots of computation problems as well as proofs you can work through so you can get a nice feel for the subject. I would also hunt down the pdf for Dummit and Foote's book as well, I thought it was pretty gentle for the most part as well as comprehensive.

For analysis and topology, I have encountered some decent books.

Strichartz for analysis is very wordy and conversational, so I didn't care for it myself hence didn't read very much of it (I much prefer the style of Walter Rudin) but it might be good for starting out.

Bhatt has written a very nice book for analysis and covers a lot of material on metric space topology. I actually know the author pretty well so if you are interested in the book I may be able to hook you up.

Simmons has written a book that has a pretty conversational style, but I wasn't a big fan of his style. Bhatt's book will have a more "traditional" approach, but thats not to say it isn't readable. The first half of the book will cover the same stuff Bhatt's book does and the second half will be more advanced stuff including some concepts from Functional Analysis (which is a pretty interesting topic).

For Topology, if you have read some of the analysis books above, I would say Munkres' book is nice and it has tons of examples. But try googling beginner topology books if you want to get into the subject sooner, I know I have seen a few stackexchange threads on this.

These are really the topics one needs to know to really dive into mathematics beyond rote computation. I'm sure there are more books out there but these come off my head at this moment.

If you're looking to get started, you should start with a good book like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics-John-Anderson/dp/0070016852

That book starts out with the basics of Fluid Dynamics equations and is really very good.

Turbulence theory and turbulence modeling is a pretty advanced topic. You will first have to learn about laminar boundary layers, boundary layer equations and then about transition to turbulence, turbulent boundary layers and turbulence modeling.

This is the best book I have read on Boundary Layer theory that covers both laminar and turbulent flow:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3540662707/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1425473580&sr=8-1&keywords=schlicting+boundary+layer&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&dpPl=1&dpID=41ZQZkmQBNL&ref=plSrch

Turbulence modeling is something you can move on to after that. I recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1928729088/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1425473660&sr=8-1&keywords=wilcox+turbulence+modeling

Wilcox goes into much detail about the nature of turbulence and the different methods that have been formulated to model this phenomenon.

Here is a book that talks about the basics of fluid dynamics that is pretty good too:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0123821002/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1425473759&sr=8-1&keywords=kundu+fluid+mechanics&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&dpPl=1&dpID=41h-Ynv4uGL&ref=plSrch


Another great resource is this set of fluid dynamics videos made a few decades ago. They are awesome and will give you a strong conceptual understanding:
http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf.html

There you go. I'm sorry if I was unclear on anything. Let me know about it and I'll be glad to help you out more.

Now could you point me to some material about how you use hydrodynamics in your field? I love to learn about different fields! Thank you in advance!

Well, in my case, it was the MatSci degree; so, er, yeah, that's an option!

More realistically, the primary textbook we used was: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Materials-Science-Engineering-William-Callister/dp/0471134597/

I'm not really a book sort of person, but I did end up using that one a lot. It's used as an undergrad text in some places, so as long as you've some high school physics/chemistry you should be ok with that. It describes itself as an introduction, and I'd agree with that - there were areas that it stopped a little short on for me; but I'm pretty sure that they will not be areas of practical importance for blacksmithing. (Generally the more esoteric areas).

It does cover more than just metals - ceramics, polymers and composites too. Presuming you want to learn inspired from the smithing, you'll want to focus on the metallurgy - which is understandable, but it's well worth reading a little into the other sorts of materials. The mechanics of plastic deformation are much clarified by considering polymers; the way a cutting edge works is much more like a ceramic; and hypo eutectic steels are actually a metal/ceramic composite in microstructure (and there's lots more overlap too).

Like all academic books, the sticker prices is in the 'eye watering' category; don't let that put you off. Get an older edition, used, and go back until you find a price that suits you. The difference from the latest edition matters in two cases: to follow along with a lecture series; and the 'up to date-ness' of the state of the art stuff - I don't think that either is a good reason for you to pay extra, in this context. Steel is a pretty old fashioned material, and really the point of such a book is education, to give you the grounding so that you could pick up the specific details of a new steel quickly from a few diagrams and a data sheet.

The other stuff I covered (Ulfberht, crucible steel etc), really comes from a separate interest in historical stuff, and that's something I've picked up organically (rubbing shoulders with archaeologists at living history events for a large part), so I'm not in a position to recommend anything there.

FWIW, last time I took political compass quiz I was left libertarian, the exact opposite of all the presidential candidates. I think from their questions they plot me libertarian mostly on anti-war grounds. ;-)

Also, maybe I'm more leftist then I think. ;-)

Though I lean somewhat libertarian, personally I think the US libertarian party is much worse than the major parties on protecting positive liberties and rights. If I had to align with a party, it would be the Greens.

They take both positive rights and liberties seriously and are future focused, something sorely lacking in our society.

Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now and Whole Earth Dicipline have highly influenced my thinking.

If you don't know who Stewart Brand is, he is one of the most influential people of the last century in both environmentalism and technology, and is a deep pragmatist worth taking seriously, unlike many in the movement he helped start.

> but never demonstrated

What do you even mean by that? Water vapor content in the atmosphere must go up when it gets warmer, it is impossible for it to do anything else. And we measure this increase corresponding to the warming atmosphere.

> above the equator are actually the result of increased water vapor acting as secondary effects of CO2 absorption of IR.

That's not the point at all. The point is when it gets warmer, there is more water vapor in the atmosphere. That doesn't need to be "proven", that's thermodynamics 101.

> Not mine. YOU prove their truth, or quit lying on the internet

Here's your proof.

> You claim CO2 is the main forcing. And it is to a point, but that point has been passed and now it has declining effect.

Look, I have certain sympathy for laymen theory but sometimes it's just too much. What you are trying to say (what exactly are you trying to say?) does not make any sense. Please support your ramblings with literature sources, even denialist sources, or WUWT blogposts so I can at leas start comprehending what your "argument" actually is.

> Now show a 10% decline in overall solar radiation that accounts for your last bit of nonsense. just document it. Better yet give us an explanation of how the Stage 5 problem doesn't kill that little hypothesis of yours.

???

I'm not claiming that this is what happened, I just want to make clear to you that you can see some cooling even when CO2 is increasing, because there are other factors at play as well.

The Feynman lectures are really good, and they will take you from basic physics to quantum mechanics.

Get yourself a good groundwork in physics before you worry about flashy things like relativity. The ability to spout out fancy words about fancy-sounding fields really means nothing if you don't actually understand what you are talking about.

Now, this said, once you are ready to dive into quantum mechanics, I'd personally recommend Griffiths.

As a chemical engineer specialized in electron microscopy, I am partial to solid-state physics and physics at the atomic scale, so if you are interested in such small things, I would recommend Callister as an introductory book (it is basically the bible of materials science, and is an excellent beginner book and reference) and Kasap as a very readable book on solid-state physics.

With any such books, unless you are using the book for a class and it is required that you have a particular version, don't worry about getting the newest edition. An older edition will generally save you a lot of money if you purchase a hard copy. That said, it is easy enough to find most of them digitally if you are so inclined.

> What happens if the crystal is not cubic? I assume the circular dichroism cancels in some way, but why?

Cubic crystals tend not to alleviate the degeneracy of the M_J quantum numbers (I'm just talking about atomic transitions here, not crystal states or molecular states). There are situations where imperfections cause symmetry breaking that leads to alleviation of degeneracy, but not in a perfect crystal. This only applies to insulators by the way. If you have a metallic crystal, free currents in the metal can cause circular dichroism.

> In what way do things get complicated, exactly?

You can have chiral molecules, but floating in solution their relative orientations are random. As a result circular dichroism is not measurable in the ensemble unless you can cause macroscopic alignment of the molecules (like in a chiral nematic liquid crystal).

Also, it's complicated because molecular wavefunctions are not as intuitive as atomic wavefunctions. It's tough to figure out whether a molecule will exhibit certain optical properties without doing molecular orbital calculations. Though, group theory can give you a reasonable intuition for many cases.

> Are there any handles I could use to understand things better?

This is a pretty complex topic that requires an understanding of quantum mechanics and group theory. I didn't fully understand all of this until the last year of my Ph.D. You should take some classes in condensed and soft matter, for starters.

There are some books I guess I could recommend:

• Bransden and Joachain
  
  
• Tinkham
  
  
• Bishop
  
• Powell
  
  
• Henderson and Imbusch (my favorite)
  
  As for what keywords to use in a literature seach. I couldn't tell you. There are quite a few situations that lead to circular dichroism which require different physics to understand. Without knowing exactly what domain you are working in and the details of what you are trying to do, I can only suggest you look for "circular dichroism" on google scholar.
  
  I posted a comment a while ago describing, in detail, my workflow for understanding a topic. Maybe it will help you figure out what you are trying to figure out.

I'm a mechanical, but I found J.E. Gordon's

https://www.amazon.ca/New-Science-Strong-Materials-Gordon/dp/0140135979/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=why+you+don%27t+fall+through+the+floor&qid=1554554032&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

and

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=structures+or+why+things+don%27t+fall+down&crid=2RE2JL3NBE3K6&sprefix=why+things+don%2Caps%2C191&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_14

both entertaining and eye-opening. Gordon was in on the beginning of fracture mechanics, but snuck away from classes to soak in an art gallery. I particularly remember that wood is a great material for panels (if it didn't exist we would have to invent it) that on a weight basis sinew is nearly the best material for energy storage, and that amphorae were the Greek equivalent of the Coke can, and they are beautiful because the Greeks were incapable of creating anything ugly. Seeing a can in the street reminds me that we are not only capable, but nearly revel in our ability.

The really eye-opening one for me were his comments on masonry structures, particularly scaling. If you build a model of a cathedral, and it stands up, it can be built to any scale until you reach the compressive strength of the rock, which is kilometres high. That means that the cathedral that took 400 years to build had its foundations laid by people who knew that their granchildren's granchildren would not see it completed.

We don't build like that anymore.

Neither book is nuts and bolts, light on math, and more directed to sharpening your eye than beefing up your calculations.

I'm sure all the materials science is out of date, but I doubt that much of it is wrong.

Fluid Mechanics 4th Edition by Kundu (A good graduate level text. The practice problems are really great and challenging. The 5th edition has better practice problems, but the layout and content of the 4th is better IMO.)

Elementary Fluid Dynamics by Achenson (Good graduate level text with mathematical rigor.)

Fluid Mechanics by Granger (A good undergraduate level text.)

An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics by Batchelor (This one is much more advanced than the rest.)

• Shigley's is my go to for any machine component calculations
  
• Engineering Materials by Budinski is pretty good for material information and selection if you can get how full of themselves the authors are
  
• BASF Design Solutions Guide (PDF link) is a pretty good resource on designing things like snaps, fits, ribs, etc. and other things related to injection molding design.
  
• Machinery's Handbook is just incredibly useful for anything involving fits, threads, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "field study". If you mean experiments, then yes, there are likely hundreds or thousands, as this is well-established theory that predicts numerous results in condensed matter physics; e.g. electronic properties of metals, superconductivity, superfluidity, etc.

This topic can be found in any of the standard texts on many-body physics, a subject also often referred to as condensed-matter quantum field theory. My favorites are "AGD" (i.e. the guys who invented this technique), Mahan, and Coleman (which is the most pedagogical of the three).

If you're looking for something to Google, you might want to try "finite temperature field theory" and "Matsubara formalism".

I'm not sure what your level is, but this is pretty technical stuff; I literally never heard of these concepts (other than randomly hearing the phrase "imaginary time") until taking a graduate course on many-body theory. I honestly don't know of any popular books that discuss finite temperature QFT in detail (not that I'm particularly well-versed in the popular literature, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that usually makes its way into the usual "multiverse/wormhole/strings/black holes" books). If you want to know more in detail, but don't know what a time evolution operator is, you'll need to learn basic nonrelativistic quantum mechanics; R. Shankar's book is a good way to learn about that, though Griffiths is a bit more accessible.

I don't know of any decent online particle physics resources. But there are two good books at the undergraduate level I can think of Griffiths and Halzen and Martin

For superconductivity you want to learn many body quantum mechanics, ie non-relativistic quantum field theory. The most common recommendation is Fetter and Walecka, but I might consider Thouless to be superior on account of it being 1/3rd the length and probably only covers core topics. If you feel like dropping a lot of money, Mahan is very good, but also somewhat exhaustive. Might be worth having as a reference depending on how serious you get. I would get F&W and Thouless simply on account of how cheap they are.

During my materials engineering BEng I found the following books to be quite useful as general reference and self learning for the first two years.

Askeland: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Engineering-Materials-Donald-Askeland/dp/0495296023/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408623880&sr=8-1&keywords=askeland+materials
(I bought this book for only $1 second hand off of abebooks.com)

Callister: http://www.amazon.com/Materials-Science-Engineering-An-Introduction/dp/1118324579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408624073&sr=8-1&keywords=callister+materials
(Callister is very useful although lacks information on metallurgy since it is only an introduction book)

For metals and alloys I found these to be the most useful:

Reardon: http://www.amazon.com/Metallurgy-Non-Metallurgist-Second-Edition-05306G/dp/1615038213/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1408624192&sr=8-2&keywords=metallurgy

Polmear: http://www.amazon.com/Light-Alloys-Metallurgy-Material-Science/dp/0340491752/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1408624234&sr=8-2&keywords=polmear+light+alloys

I hope this helps

It’s not an article, but I’m reading Materials modelling using density function theory. It’s a great introduction into density function theory and the maths that under pins it. The possible applications and the ability to greatly reduce the cost of research is amazing. Chapter one to four are my favourite. Materials modelling

There is a new text by van Santen entitled "Modern Heterogeneous Catalysis: An Introduction". It covers a ton of ground and really gives a great overview of a wide range of modern catalytic reactions that are industrially relevant. I encourage you to check out the table of contents in the free preview to see if it's up your alley. The book tries to give a broad overview of the field as a whole that you could only learn from someone that is an expert in the field.

Another text that is similar in scope is Chorkendorff's "Concepts of Modern Catalysis and Kinetics". This one has a bit more background but isn't as much of a survey of the field as van Santen's text is.

Someone below has mentioned "Fundamental Concepts in Heterogeneous Catalysis" by Norskov. This is a very accessible book but is mainly targeted at the computational catalysis folk (and if this were of interest, I'd also recommend RSC's "Computational Catalysis").

Yeah. Being brittle means a material will break without plastic deformation. Plastic deformation is deformation where material is permanently deformed but doesn't break (think bending a paperclip vs breaking chalk).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ductility

Those might help (I just skimmed them briefly but I think they'd be a decent overview).

http://www.amazon.com/Materials-Science-Engineering-An-Introduction/dp/0470556730

That's a good pretty textbook if you want to learn what a typical mechanical engineering program covers.

Not to push but why make it as small as possible? A 2 terabyte usb drive is like $80-95. Price for storage is very very cheap.

Accessing the data is also cheap hardware wise a raspberry pi or any other 35 SOP (system on a chip) can then access and play back that data to a tv, monitor, etc.

Check out a book called The clock of the long now some very very smart people go together about the end of humanity. How do you leave signs, like "don't dig here radioactive waste" to a culture five thousand years in the future who may have any technology range from stone tools to pre industrial, and any language.

That's a no ref amazon link as I could not find something better.

A good wikipedia page on the square-cube law to start digging for various sources. It's such a solid part of maths and materials that most papers on it are probably filled with 'thou art' and so forth.

Again a wikipedia page, this time on fracture mechanics and, specifically the 'griffiths crack length'. This stuff was worked out after WW1 boats started splitting in half unexpectedly due to square portholes and access hatches rather than ones with rounded edges. This subject is so demonstrated we cover it in first-year engineering at uni.

A great pair of books on the subject that are both very informative AND fun to read rather than just dry academia are Structures; or why things don't fall down and The new science of strong materials; or why we don't fall through the flaw. I know those links are for amazon but hopefully you can find a copy in a library or something.

This is a pretty standard book for fluid power stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Fluid-Power-Applications-Anthony-Esposito/dp/0135136903
If i recall it focuses more on hydraulics (although there is some pneumatics), which is still useful because the logic is the same.

Unfortunately, I dont know of any free resources, though I'm sure they exist. Hands-on experience with this kind of stuff is huge... If you're able to acquire / get access to some valves, actuators etc I would definitely recommend fooling around with them... For a small pneumatic-driven project I once used a mini portable compressor and it worked decently.

Recently graduated so my advice might be out of date.
It can be kind of risky to get books early in case there is some kind of switch or if the professor prefers another text. This being said, the standard nature of certain class curricula makes it a pretty sure bet on what book they will use.

For as along as I know Statics and Dynamics use the latest edition of Meriam and Kraige. I dont know how frequently those editions are renewed but the material itself doesnt really change.

I don't know what text deforms uses but try to find what last springs classes used (likely they all used the same book) and look for the most recent edition in case it was updated recently.

ENGE 1216 I don't remember having a text.

Never used a book for E Theory and that will depend on your instructor.

Wasn't an ME so I can't help with thermo-fluids

Materials Engineering will almost without a doubt use Callister. http://www.amazon.com/Materials-Science-Engineering-William-Callister/dp/1118324579/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404986941&sr=1-1&keywords=Callister+materials

Hope that helps!

That's where a course in dynamics comes into play. I cannot recommend this book enough when it comes to the subject of vectorial analysis of dynamics. Rao is extremely detailed and systematic throughout. By the end of the book you can prove things like the tennis racket theorem, or derive the equations of motion of complicated systems like this.

There is no 'complete' text book on fluid mechanics; it's a massive area of study, and there are thousands of publications every year that move it forward.

I really think your best bet is to pick up an introductory book and go from there. Different sub fields and specialisms apply different areas of fluid mechanics in different ways. And don't forget that turbulence - which is a massive part of fluid mechanics - is still an unsolved problem. If you then start looking at complex materials like slurries, granular materials, and other 2-phase mixtures then you're getting into realms of really rather extraordinary complexity.

I find this to be a pretty good starting place (although I have the 4th edition - I haven't seen the 5th) : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fluid-Mechanics-Pijush-K-Kundu/dp/0123821002/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496312409&sr=1-1&keywords=kundu

Whatever software you are using will have documentation on how to run calculations and interpret the output. That will be the most practical source for what you are doing. For more info on the DFT method, any computation chemistry book will do. Cramer and Jensen are popular, but I've heard this monograph is great too.

Any will do. Callister is good (and apparently cheap if you buy it used).

When materials crack (that's a clean break between atoms), we call that fracture. Whether a material fractures at the grain boundaries or through the grain is a whole field unto its self called fracture mechanics. There are many things we can do to materials that either promote breaking along grain boundaries or through the grains.

Generally speaking, ceramics break as a fracture and metals don't. That's my ceramics are brittle and metals bend (ductile).

Again generally speaking plastics don't have grains. We call this amorphous. They are composed of long hydrocarbon chains. You can think of a bowl of spaghetti. The spaghetti is stuck together with weak interatomic bonds. Like spaghetti that's gone cold and doesn't have oil on it. Under special cases these chains can align, and polymer scientist would say that they form grains. But it's not quite the same as with metals and ceramics.

Wood is a complicated biological system composed of cells and cell walls. It is amorphous (again, we can define this as no long range ordering of the atoms). I can't really speak to much about wood, but I can say it doesn't have grains.

Again, for material to reattach itself the way it was, it must have no plastic deformation, and the surface must stay clean (i.e. in a vacuum). Of course you could never completely take two surfaces apart and put them back together, because even if it was a clean break, you would have to align the surface properly... down to the atomic level.

Trust me, use this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Mechanics-Statics-Dynamics-14th/dp/0133915425

The pdf versions and worked out solutions to all the problems are floating around the internet in pdf form somewhere. This book saved me and was a WAY better resource than anything they used in class

I am doing my master's in fluids and have had a few different books. I think my favorite was Granger's book and as a bonus it's really cheap!

http://www.amazon.com/Fluid-Mechanics-Dover-Books-Physics/dp/0486683567

Callister's book is the standard in MSE programs I've seen. I thought it was pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Materials-Science-Engineering-An-Introduction/dp/1118324579/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

The appearance of car windows through polarised sunglasses is due to the toughening process during manufacture, in which the hot glass is cooled by jets of air. This causes the outside surface to be in a state of compression and the inner surface to be in tension.

Strains in glass can be seen with polarised light, and using polarised sunglasses shows up the pattern of air jets used in the toughening process.

Source: The New Science of Strong Materials JE Gordon, 1968 (Footnote in Chapter 5.)

Many universities including the one I went to use Hibbeler for statics and Meriam-Kraige for general dynamics (or some combination of these authors). I wouldn't worry about getting the absolute latest edition of these books — anything published later than ~2005 should be about the same.

It also looks like Hibbeler authored a combined statics-dynamics text to cover both topics, but I've never used it.

If you're intrigued by this idea, I can recommend The Clock of the Long Now.

The problem is generally going to be the microstructure of the cell rather than the Chemistry itself. At really small scales (ie nano and sub-nano) you can almost always reverse the Chemistry by reversing the flow of electricity.

If you wanted a really crude tl;dr for battery technology development, it would be, microstructure is annoying; going to a nano scale takes microstructure out of the equation, and this can get you much closer to the performance implied by simple chemistry.

This also applies to making really strong materials; if there weren't microstructural defects messing everything up, you'd be able to directly relate material properties to chemical bond energies. If you do sums on that basis then you end up with very impressive performance. So carbon nano-tubes aren't so much massively strong, as not massively weakened by microstructural defects. See for example the excellent works of J.E. Gordon.

A few reddit favorites: House of Leaves

Neuromancer

Slaughterhouse Five

1984

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Ishmael

Cryptonomicon

The Monster at the End of This Book (and that's no a joke, it was so important to me as a child, because of what it did with the story that I read it to my own son)

and a few not on that list: The Clock of the Long Now (by Stewart Brand)

Hot House (by Pete Early)

Underworld ( by Don Delillo)

Disgrace (by J.M. Coetzee)

The Eden Express (by Mark Vonnegut)

And one book I recently picked up (because I liked the author's first novel) really blew me away: The Unnamed (by Joshua Ferris).

I was in this exact class, and you couldn't be more wrong. He writes all his own exams, draws all the figures himself. Shit, he even wrote the book on dynamics. He legitimately cares about students learning, his office is always filled with ~7 students when he has hours.

Fluid Mechanics by Granger is fairly elementary.

Undergrad MSE - Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction by William D. Callister

Along with a few of the others here...

The Clock of the Long Now - Stewart Brand.

Plus Parallel Worlds - Michio Kaku

The Hibbler text is a standard:

https://www.amazon.ca/Engineering-Mechanics-Statics-Dynamics-14th/dp/0133915425

The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. A short, open-ended discussion about history, technology, information, time.

I picked up a book about this about 5 years ago and cannot recommend it enough.

I would suggest you read your textbook, if you do not have one pertaining to materials, I would suggest Callister's Mat Sci & Engr: An Intro. Also if you are struggling this early in the semester, you may want to consider visiting the professor during office hours...

i used a similar edition to this in school. It has exactly what you're looking for.
There is a program somewhere that has this information built in, and can generate your graphs, but unfortunately I don't remember the name, nor do I believe you could/would pony up the license fee.

Doubt that I would ever go back but who knows what the future holds.

The main phase of the bachelor covers both (in-)organic (everything from orbitals to polymers to reaction mechanisms) and physical chemistry (reaction kinetics etc). After which you can chose your specialization. Since I suck at memorizing things I went the physical/analytical route which is identifying components (both quantitative and qualitative) in mixtures (solid/liquid/gas mixtures) and the theory behind them. My minor consisted of a crapton of math (had to take additional courses which weren't covered in my 'official main phase') and basically this whole book.

Have to admit that I've forgotten most it by now though :p