I've been fascinated by fluvial geomorphology for more than two decades, and the topic has routinely been a part of my professional engineering practice. I thought it would be nice to do a comprehensive review of the latest textbook-level thinking on the topic, and I found this book by Ro Charlton to be ideal for that purpose. More specifically, the book is well organized, the writing is clear, the graphics are ample and effective, and the level of detail is "just right" (sufficient for everyone other than specialists, hence the "fundamentals" title). In other words, I learned from this book, and I also enjoyed the learning process.
Unfortunately, the book does reinforce my impression that fluvial geomorphology is still at a relatively immature stage which is mostly just descriptive, with few practically useful predictive models to be found, and with models being more qualitative than quantitative. Of course, this is a consequence of the inherent complexity of streams, not a fault of the book (which is only telling it like it is).
The bottom line is that I recommend this book to anyone seeking an overview of the fundamentals of fluvial geomorphology. I know of no better book for that purpose, and I've looked around fairly diligently.
