LAUSR

The title of this textbook does not do justice to the extent of the material covered therein. The author attempts to summarize and encapsulate the entire workflow of mining from international standards, minerals supply-demand, prospecting, geophysics, drilling, resource estimation, mine optimization, mine scheduling, reserve evaluation, metallurgical recovery, and sustainable design. This is complemented with a chapter on functionalities of current software packages used in the mining industry. The span of subject matter is massive; and it is truly impressive that a single author was brave enough and capable to deliver such a book. The reviewer has witnessed many technical failures and collected lessons on what makes mining projects succeed or fail. Most of these lessons are not typically taught in university, often because they are either too qualitative in nature or they cross over to another science or engineering field. These basic but important mining principles are presented throughout the textbook, and are extremely useful for student or teachers learning about mining activities outside their area of expertise. The greatest strength of this book is that dozens of these basic principles of the mining industry are succinctly described and often supported by case studies, thus making them tangible to the reader. The author does an admirable job in keeping a solid balance in the level of detail for each of the dozens of themes covered. An author’s specialization is usually obvious from the excess detail in his given field; this was not the case for this textbook. Excellent references are provided for the readers that desire to further increase their knowledge on a given subject. The many grammatical errors and awkward phrasing exposes the fact that English is not the author’s fist language. On average, there is about one error per page. This is especially apparent in the introductions to the chapters where some sentences are clumsy at best, or illegible at worst. For example, BModern core drilling rigs carry out fast and efficient core sampling of different diameters to very large length.^ The sample questions at the end of the chapters are not very useful; they are poorly phrased and commonly far too specific or too vague. BWhat ‘gossan’ means? Explain its importance.^ or BExplain the main sampling drillhole procedures.^ The use of the adverb Bnowadays,^ for which there are 26 occurrences, is not in common use in technical writing as it is considered too informal or colloquial. However, the most common error is the inappropriate use of Bbeing^ after a comma, for example: BThe GEOEAS is probably the most famous public domain geostatistical software in the history, being a suite of tools for carrying out two-dimensional geostatistical analysis of spatially distributed data.^ There are more than 150 such instances in the text, and although the reader can understand the core of the sentence, it is an unnecessary distraction. There is also an overuse of abbreviations; many of them are not used beyond the initial appearance and not in common use in the mining industry. Notable examples include porphyry copper deposits (PCD), minimum mining grade (MMG), and inverse distance cubed (IDC). There are many useful and inspiring images and tables included in the text. There are a few, however, that are not particularly useful such as an artist’s rendition of the Landsat 8 Satellite. A spectral histogram showing useful frequency bands, or a map showing correspondence between the signal and mineralogy would have provided more insight. A glaring Editorial handling: G. Beaudoin