I am a professional computer scientist and systems engineer, and have found this book incredibly useful far outside of its normal role as a textbook for PhD students. This book does not focus on the the "how to do engineering/science" aspects of engineering and technology. Instead it zeros in on the all too rare subject of "what is engineering and science?" This is a very esoteric subject, and Dr. Bock combines scientific rigor, narrative, and some dialog in order to bring this subject down to earth. It discusses the complete scientific method, and how these steps fit into real world projects. It shows actual pitfalls and common mistakes that we practitioners commonly make, and it ties up the entire methodological process into an end to end template for research practices, analytical exploration, and evaluation practices.

I recommend this book not only to grad students and scientists, but to practicing engineers who design and build things that have never been built before.

I was a student of Peter and found his passion for science and truth astounding. This book covers not only methods for pure and applied research, it touches on the profound subject of how we "know" what we know, how to best increase that knowledge, and how to measure and increase our confidence that we - got it right.

I read this book in conjunction with taking the author's Research and Evaluation Methods class. I found a lot of useful information in this book. I think it can be very helpful to those writing not only doctoral dissertations, but also master's theses or publications. It definitely teaches you a very structural approach to research.