The way the book is laid out is quite nice. The information is useful, interesting, and presented in a down to earth and logical fashion. The homework problems are definitely a departure from the norm, as they leave a lot of blanks for the reader to fill in, which also means that there is no right answer to many of the problems. Because of this, there are no answers in the back of the book to compare your work with. For example, there is a question that simply asks "how much beer is consumed in the US per day?", no other information or assumptions are provided so you have to come up with a creative and realistic way to answer the question. This is consistent with the nature of environmental engineering, being that there usually aren't any right or wrong answers, so long as you can defend your work/opinion. At first I did not like the book, but after using it for a semester I really like the freedom to be creative in my analysis. This book is printed in black an white, which is a GREAT. They don't have to coat the pages in that funky clay treatment that you have to do for color printing, so the book is about a third the weight of a comparable color textbook, and the size is very convenient. My one complaint is that I think that the price is unreasonable, and that's why it is a 4 star book. Great content, but too big a price tag.
