[.ca] Today's Technician: Medium/Heavy Duty Truck Diesel ... (ISBN 0827372213)

A little short of expecations:
I'm one chapter away from finishing the classroom manual. I expected that the author would do an excellent job on the complicated topic of diesel engines, but fell short of my expectations. In all fairness, the author did an adequate job overall. He starts out with a bang in the second chapter explaining the different horsepower ratings such as HP, BHP, FHP and IHP. After that terrific start, the succeding chapters got a little less in-depth. I do like the fact that the subject matter is divided into two topics- theory and application. The classroom manual covers the theory and the shop manual covers the practical, "hands-on", side of being a diesel technician. Delmar does this with all of their Today's Technician series of books. If you are interested in a thorough approach with much better diagrams and pictures then "Diesel Technology" by Norman, Corinchock, and Scharff is the book to get.

Lost a star for typos and noncontinuity, otherwise great.:
I bought and read this book(it's actually two books, the shop manual is spiral bound, the class text is glue bound) in anticipation of buying my first truck. I'm not a tech so take my review with a grain of salt. The theory and general information seem adequate. There are a lot of detailed descriptions of repairs that are probably best left to OEM specific instructions. The end of the book was the most pertinent for me. It describes diagnostic tools and signs of trouble like smoke. I would have prefered more detail on the more/most common failures/problems encountered in used engines and how to detect them, though there was a fair amount of that. The book lost a point for not doing a thourough job of quality control. There are a lot of typos and missing/misplaced words and such. Not such a big deal, but kind of breaks concentration while reading. Essentially, this book did what I wanted it to. It described diesel engines in a way I could understand and gave me a basis for evaluating used engines, describing the tools and techniques involved, although I will have to study further to feel at all competent at such a task. So, it gets 4 stars and a recommendation as a good (and just about the only one I can find) basic, foundational book.