Before diving into the content, it is crucial to understand the author. Stanley M. Walas was a Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Kansas. He was not a theoretician locked in an ivory tower; he was an industrial veteran who worked with major oil and chemical companies.
Perhaps you have a design project due in twelve hours. You are trying to size a reactor for a fluidized bed, and you don't know the correlation for the heat transfer coefficient. You are panicked. In that panic, the name "Walas" is not an author; it is a savior.
