Book excerpt: This book offers comprehensive coverage of compressible flow phenomena and their applications, and is intended for undergraduate/graduate students, practicing professionals, and researchers interested in the topic. Thanks to the clear explanations provided of a wide range of basic principles, the equations and formulas presented here can be understood with only a basic grasp of mathematics. The book particularly focuses on shock waves, offering a unique approach to the derivation of shock wave relations from conservation relations in fluids together with a contact surface, slip line or surface; in addition, the thrust of a rocket engine and that of an air-breathing engine are also formulated. Furthermore, the book covers important fundamentals of various aspects of physical fluid dynamics and engineering, including one-dimensional unsteady flows, and two-dimensional flows, in which oblique shock waves and Prandtl-Meyer expansion can be observed.