If you don't already have a strong knowledge of chemistry, physics, and crystallography, this will be a tough book to get through (which, in my eyes, is an annoying flaw of this "short introduction"). I picked up this book looking for a general primer on material science, but I ended up with a book that assumes its readers already know the gist of a greatly varied assortment of facts. I made an effort to learn for myself all the terms that are introduced without any background or big-picture significance, so I still got something out of it. But that doesn't excuse the book's flaws. Let's say you do have the scientific background the book assumes you do. Even then, the book's structure is meandering and random. While there is an attempt to cover materials based on overarching qualities, most of the book is actually a random assortment of facts that, ironically, never fully crystallizes. ( )