Contemporary studies in technology cannot overlook the group of topics concerning quality assurance and fault-tolerance improvement. These are related to a plethora of problems, from the theoretical, such as reliability assessment or optimization, to the practical, such as the Six Sigma approach. Practitioners are in pursuit of a handbook that covers all of them in one volume. I think that this was the purpose of creating this book. Although the authors did not fully succeed, the book should be of interest for reliability researchers or instructors that need some additional material--such as examples or new trends--for intensive courses given in reliability engineering.

In this 1,300-plus-page volume, Misra gathers an enormous body of work: 74 papers written by authors from different universities and companies, the latter with both manufacturing and researching profiles; there are also a few freelance consultants. The list of the topics covered is too long to be presented in a short review. The editor divides the book into ten parts, covering system design, engineering management, quality engineering and management, reliability engineering, reliability and risk methodology, risk management and safety, maintenance engineering and maintainability, sustainability and future technologies, performability applications, and software engineering and applications.

Although the book virtually overviews the whole field of contemporary quality and reliability research, I cannot call it a scholarly handbook. First, only a reader already quite familiar with reliability research would fully gain from it. Second, the presentation of the material does not create a coherent set of lectures by adopting, for instance, consistent notation or the mathematical modeling approach. Sometimes, unnecessary repetitions have not been removed. The presentation approach adopted by the authors is diverse: some of them present very general ideas that are not extended in other chapters, and some of them give advanced concepts that require a specialized reader. These problems are typical of a book composed of many different papers, prepared by various authors. However, this prevents me from recommending the work to laymen or students. On the other hand, the technical content is impressive and the vast diversity of areas covered can be perceived as its greatest advantage; it enables, for instance, networking reliability experts to get acquainted with the mechanics of software reliability, which can be quite inspiring.