The second edition of is widely considered the "gold standard" for anyone trying to understand the Earth's crust and mantle.

Before Best, many petrology textbooks were either purely descriptive (looking at rocks under a microscope) or purely mathematical (thermodynamics). Best realized that to truly understand a rock, you needed to bridge that gap. He wrote the book to treat rocks as that tell a story of pressure, temperature, and time. 2. The Global Scope

It is famously dense. It doesn’t skip the hard parts of phase diagrams or chemical kinetics.

Best was one of the first to effectively link petrology with Plate Tectonics , showing exactly how the movement of continents creates the specific chemistry of the rocks we find today. 4. Its Legacy