Book excerpt: This third edition has been written to thoroughly update the coverage of injection molding in the World of Plastics. There have been changes, including extensive additions, to over 50% of the content of the second edition. Many examples are provided of processing different plastics and relating the results to critiCal factors, which range from product design to meeting performance requirements to reducing costs to zero-defect targets. Changes have not been made that concern what is basic to injection molding. However, more basic information has been added concerning present and future developments, resulting in the book being more useful for a long time to come. Detailed explanations and interpretation of individual subjects (more than 1500) are provided, using a total of 914 figures and 209 tables. Throughout the book there is extensive information on problems and solutions as well as extensive cross referencing on its many different subjects. This book represents the ENCYCLOPEDIA on IM, as is evident from its extensive and detailed text that follows from its lengthy Table of CONTENTS and INDEX with over 5200 entries. The worldwide industry encompasses many hundreds of useful plastic-related computer programs. This book lists these programs (ranging from operational training to product design to molding to marketing) and explains them briefly, but no program or series of programs can provide the details obtained and the extent of information contained in this single sourcebook.