Not particularly good.
I bought this book since it was the required text in a Turbulence course. In general, the book is well written and the explanations are clear. The material is organized in two main parts: Fundamentals (7 chapters), and Modeling and Simulation (6 Chapters). Although this book covers a lot of topics, I found that many of them are treated in a somewhat superficial and desultory way, specially in the Fundamentals part. For example, the core of the statistical theory of turbulence, K41 and scaling, is treated rather briefly in Chapter 6 (compare for example with the deep and enlighting discussion given by Frisch's book). Intermittency and anomalous scaling is treated in just a couple of pages. Chapter 5, on free shear flows, and 7, on boundary layers, contains a lot of experimental observations and plots but without a thorough analysis. This is too much of a "textbook", just for students that want to do their homework, but not a good treatise on this rich, deep and fascinating subject. To get real physical insight you need to read books like Frisch, or Mathieu & Scott. Also, Tennekes and Lumley, in spite of have been published more than 30 years ago (in 1972), still contains more interesting discussion on the physics of turbulence, that you miss in Pope's book.
If you want a book to get just some general knowledge on Turbulence, this book can be helpful. If you really want to learn Turbulence to do research on this field I think it's better to start with that other introductory books (before reading the classical treatises [e.g. Monin & Yaglom] and papers). The book by Durbin and Peterson Reif is also better than this one. I have bought all of them, and the least used book in my shelf is Pope's.
Modernized account of turbulence
This is an excellent addition to the turbulence textbooks. The physical meanings of equations are well explained and cast in a way that helps the understanding of the subject tremendously. In contrast to earlier textbook by Lumley and Tenneky, this book is much cleaner in explaining the conncetions between the physical phenomenon and the mathematical treatment. However, it lacks the experimental side of the subject, which, however, can be found in other classic textbooks, such as Hinze's Turbulence. This book also has lots of updates on modern modeling techniques, including PDF, DNS and LES. The exercise problems are well organized and complement the context very well. Highly recommended.
best book for pdf.
well, Professor Pope is the best professor so far on pdf modeling of turbulent. Before the book was printed, he use it as a textbook on MAE732, Turbulent analysis, in Cornell univeristy. we are really impressed by pdf.