Book excerpt: Systematic Materials Analysis, Volume II presents a broad range of instrumental methods and approaches that will yield the desired information about a given material. This book serves as a guide for the purchase of new instrumentation. Organized into nine chapters, this volume starts with an overview of the analytical methods on the bases of specimen limitations and information desired by using flow charts encompassing the various instruments. This book then proceeds with a discussion of the specific instruments that outline the theories of operation. Other chapters consider the capability of the methods for quantitative and qualitative measurements of structure, texture, and chemical composition. This text discusses as well the selectivity and sensitivity of each method. The final chapter deals with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and provides a listing of known manufacturers of commercial ESCA (Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis) instrumentation. Materials analysts, laboratory administrator, biological scientists, engineers, and researchers will find this book extremely useful.