Concise yet thorough, accessible, authoritative, and affordable. These are the hallmarks of books in the remarkable Physics and its Applications series. Thermodynamics is an essential part of any physical sciences education, but it is so full of pitfalls and subtleties, that many students fail to appreciate its elegance and power. In Thermal Physics, the author emphasizes understanding the basic ideas and shows how the important thermodynamics results can be simply obtained from the fundamental relations without getting lost in a maze of partial differentials. In this second edition, the author incorporated new sections on scales of temperature, availability, the degradation of energy, and lattice defects. The text contains ample illustrations and examples of applications of thermodynamics in physics, engineering, and chemistry.