Practicing engineers will find this text helpful in getting up to date. Readers with some familiarity with this field will be able to follow the presentations with ease. Engineering students and those taking physics courses will find this book to be a useful source of examples of applications of the theory to commercially available materials as well as for uncomplicated explanations of physical properties. In many cases alternate explanations have been provided for clarity.An effort has been made to keep mathematics as an unsophisticated as possible without watering downor distorting the concepts. In practically all cases only a master of elementary calculus is required to follow the derivations. All of the algebrais shown and no steps in the derivations are considered to be obvious to the reader. Explanations are provided in cases where more advanced mathematics is employed The problems have been designed to promote understanding rather than mathematical or computational skill.