Book Review : Rapid Response Manufacturing: Contemporary Methodologies, Tools and Techniques, Edited by Jian (John) Dong; Published by Chapman & Hall ISBN 0-412-78010-0

merous new technologies have been developed for rapid product design and realization, which has gamed a lot of interest from government agencies, industries and academia. The technologies for rapid response manufacturing involve research from a wide range of engineering and computer science areas. The current research and practice m rapid response manufacturing deals with primarily two major topics: desktop technologies for rapid response manufacturing, and computer and information technologies for rapid response manufacturmg. The chapters m this book address a variety of contemporary methodologies, technologies and tools for rapid response manufactunng The contributions m the book focus on two major RRM areasdesktop manufactunng, computer and mformation technologies. This book consists of 12 chapters. In the second chapter Jee et al presents the research work on the development of the automated design of a three-dimensional printed mushroom surface texture which will be used m a rapid prototypmg process, 3D printing Rapid prototypmg (or solid freeform fabrication) is one of the desktop manufacturing processes, which produces physical parts directly from computer models. In the third chapter Masood describes mtelhgent rapid prototypmg by first highlighting the nature of the problems with current rapid prototypmg systems and then discussing the configuration of the intelligent RP systems. Fellom et al. present an investigation of the surface features of rapid prototypmg parts. Dong et al. discuss a new rapid prototypmg technology by using fiber-coupled high-power laser diodes to directly smter metal powders. Jurrens et al. describe the results from the rapid response manufacturmg intramural project conducted at the National Insti-