If you develop B&W film and print in a darkroom you need this book

Good book. It has a high level of detail and provides a ton of good information.

Great reference manual. Well written and easy to access the subject you seek. Well formatted and well written.

This is a newly expanded version of this reference text. There is a lot of information here of use to relatively experienced photographers, but it is not well suited to beginners.

I am a little concerned about the quality and durability of the binding. The back tends to break when opening the book and just allowing the pages to relax against the table. No extra force applied.

There is much food for thought in the book, but there are also some odd blunders. As one example, Appendix 6 discusses the change in exposure needed for a change in enlargement, and it gives a patently wrong answer. Stated in different words than the article, it says that the exposure should be proportional to the area of the print (for the same cropping). On the surface, that sounds fine, sounding like energy conservation, but it misses the fact that the distance from the negative to the lens changes when the degree of enlargement changes. In turn that changes the amount of light collected by the lens. (Changing the focus changes the effective aperture somewhat.) In mathematical words, for a given magnification M, the article says that the exposure should be proportional to the square of (M), whereas the correct answer is proportional to the square of (M+1) (for a normal lens). For a 35 mm negative the difference is small, because M is large. However, for the 8x10" negative used as the example, the error is large (about 34%).

You have to love it - the book is the only subject matter of its type to my knowledge currently in print. It is also unique in assembling all of this information in one place. I got the 1st edition many years ago.. Each subsequent edition and this latest is a marginal improvement, partly as to additional information of marginal usage, but also with better organization and indexing. Anyone wanting to compound their own conventional types of photo chemistry [black & white] could probably do just as well with any edition. Note that the information on "alternative processes" varies from sufficient down to minimal - you may have to fall back on the internet to fill out your knowledge of some of the more uncommonly used processes. If you get into such oddities, you will be doing that anyway. This not a beginner's guide to DIY film developing. There are many "how to do it" books out there, and most all of them are a better education for the newbe to film processing techniques.