Book excerpt: This book provides an invaluable reference of materials engineering written for a broad audience in an engaging, effective way. Several stories explain how perseverance and organized research helps to discover new processes for making important materials and how new materials with unmatched properties are theoretically conceived, tested in the laboratory, mass produced and deployed for the benefit of all. This book provides a welcome introduction to how advances are made in the world of materials that sustain and define our contemporary standard of living. Suitable for trained materials scientists and the educated layman with an appreciation of engineering, the book will be especially appealing to the young materials engineer, for whom it will serve as a long-term reference due to its clear and rigorous illustration of the field's essential features.