Book excerpt: Analytical Heat Diffusion Theory is a revised edition of an earlier book by Academician Luikov, which was widely used throughout the Soviet Union and the surrounding socialist countries. This book is divided into 15 chapters that treat heat conduction problems by the classical methods and emphasize the advantages of the transform method, particularly in obtaining short time solutions of many transient problems. This book starts with a discussion on the physical fundamentals, generalized variables, and solution of boundary value problems of heat transfer. Considerable chapters are devoted to the basic classical heat transfer problems and problems in which the body surface temperature is a specified function of time. Other chapters explore the heat transfer problems under different heat sources, including continuous and pulse-type. The discussion then shifts to the problem of freezing wet ground, two-dimensional temperature field, and heat conduction with variable transfer coefficients. The final chapters deal with the fundamentals of the integral transforms and their application to heat conduction problems. These chapters also look into the application of the theory of analytic functions to the heat conduction theory of mathematical physics. This book is an invaluable source for advanced undergraduate or graduate in analytical heat transfer.