A successful career is the goal of most working people. For most people, becoming successful is the result of having a significant amount of determination and dedication. Unfortunately, many employees view their abilities, skills, or education sufficient for a "job", but insufficient to achieve real success. Why settle for just having a job when you can improve and have a successful career? This book focuses on the average worker and discusses the essential principles, practices, skills and attitudes necessary to become a valuable employee. This book addresses actions to take and things to avoid, identifies many risk and reward scenarios, offers suggestions concerning issues of importance, and is augmented with helpful personal worksheets. Success involves a mental change to think success, recognize your worth as an employee, implement a self-improvement process and develop good work habits. This book can help make those things happen.
The first concern of scientists who are interested in synthetic polymers has always been, and still is: How are they synthesized? But right after this comes the question: What have I made, and for what is it good? This leads to the important topic of the structure-property relations to which this book is devoted. Polymers are very large and very complicated systems; their character ization has to begin with the chemical composition, configuration, and con formation of the individual molecule. The first chapter is devoted to this broad objective. The immediate physical consequences, discussed in the second chapter, form the basis for the physical nature of polymers: the supermolecular interactions and arrangements of the individual macromolecules. The third chapter deals with the important question: How are these chemical and physical structures experimentally determined? The existing methods for polymer characterization are enumerated and discussed in this chapter. The following chapters go into more detail. For most applications-textiles, films, molded or extruded objects of all kinds-the mechanical and the thermal behaviors of polymers are of pre ponderant importance, followed by optical and electric properties. Chapters 4 through 9 describe how such properties are rooted in and dependent on the chemical structure. More-detailed considerations are given to certain particularly important and critical properties such as the solubility and permeability of polymeric systems. Macromolecules are not always the final goal of the chemist-they may act as intermediates, reactants, or catalysts. This topic is presented in Chapters 10 and 11.
