Chemical Engineering Reference Manual for the PE Exam, 6th ed.

Reader Reviews
This is the best reference book available for the chemical PE exam. If you can only bring one book to the exam room, this is it. The fact that the author is not a chemical engineer shows in the presentation and contents. As has been pointed out by others, the book is extremely skimpy on chemical kinetics. The kinetics chapter has only 4 and a half pages of text, but you can bring other books or your own notes to the exam to make up for this deficiency. The distillation section only alludes to the concepts of minimum reflux and total reflux graphically in an off-handed way, with no verbal discussion of these 2 important concepts at all. In fact, the term "minimum reflux" is not even listed in the index. The important concept of fugacity is nowhere to be found in the whole book. However, overall, I still think the author and his assistants did an excellent job putting together this marvelous reference book for the exam, the skimpy kinetics portion and other oversights notwithstanding. This book isn't particularly good as an exam prep study guide because it has too much information, a great deal of it on minor subjects most chem E's did not learn in school. Using it to prepare for the PE exam is a bit like using Perry's Handbook to study for the exam. It can be done, but one will quickly get bogged down. It is, however, indispensable for use during the exam because of its very rich collection of reference information one will find useful during the exam, such as formulas, charts, tables, constants, and unit conversion tables, etc, plus materials on the many minor topics that most chem E's did not learn in school and do not have time now to prepare for. Don't study using this book. Instead, browse through the pages and be aware of what's in it so that when a question on an arcane subject, such as environmental law, OSHA law, safety, etc, comes up during the exam you can quickly find an answer by using the index. I answered many more questions during the exam by relying on this book this way. It's the most useful book to bring to the exam room. For exam preparation to review the main chemical engineering concepts and to practice solving problems with speed, use Kaplan's Chemical Engineering: License Review by Dilip Das and Rajaram Prabhudesai. Das/Prabhudesai is much more user-friendly and much less dense, but the Das/Prabhudesai book is very lacking in reference information, something that is the obvious strength of Lindeburg. I credit my passing the Chem E PE exam on my first attempt in large part to having this book with me. I had been out of school for 22 years and didn't use my Chem E training on my job during this span and I only put in thirty to 50 hours of study, plus another 42 hours SITTING(big emphasis here!) through a review course where I did not do a single homework assignment, so altogether less than 100 hours of actual preparation time however I count it. Still I managed to pull it off on the first try. Could I have succeeded anyway without this book? Possibly, but this Lindeburg book certainly helped tremendously in the success of my endeavor. My advice for anyone preparing for the chemical PE is to get both Das and Lindeburg. Yes, you'll have to shell out the money for both sets of books, but doing so is still far cheaper than having to take the exam twice! Bottomline: this is an indispensible REFERENCE MANUAL for use during the exam(look at the book title!), but not a great study guide. Get both Das and this book to pass the exam.