by Don S. Lemons - Bethel College, Kansas (retired)
The outstanding feature of Advances… is its completeness. If you have ever encountered a problem in understanding or analyzing an aspect of the vdW fluid, the solution to your problem is outlined here. Johnston slowly and incrementally explores every feature of the vdW fluid including its relation to the Lennard-Jones potential via a mean field approximation, its free energy and chemical potential, bulk properties, critical point, corresponding states, Maxwell construction, coexistence region, lever rule, and order parameter. The vdW fluid, unlike the ideal gas, is a perfect test-bed for thermodynamic concepts.
Most of the material in this text is appropriate for an undergraduate thermal physics course. After all, the physics of the gas–liquid phase transition is motivated by the every day experience of making coffee or tea. Still, the book is organized more as an encyclopedic reference than as a textbook introducing the subject. Its results are presented in well-organized text, equations, graphs, and tables. Johnston does not waste words—or his reader's time. Only once did I question whether a topic, in this case, the "Boyle point," was worth the space allotted.
The book's production values are high and Johnston has taken great care in its composition. I checked much of its mathematics and many of its internal references and found no problems. Every thermodynamicist who teaches or does research should own a copy of this book.