Engineering Mechanics , Statics

Rating:
Summary: A user friendly Eng Mech text.
Review: My lecturer for this subject in first year was excellent, and took the time to explain all that was needed, so I never really looked at Dynamics, and Statics was fairly easy. On hitting second year, however, I found that it was not that easy. I fell back on the text, and found that it covered all that I needed. Between myself, a friend and Meriam and Kraige I was able to score a pretty decent mark, and much more importantly understand what it was all about.

The book has fair to good examples, plenty of diagrams and a fairly accessible approach. Being an incipient engineer rather than a mathematician, I found that I coped very well with the style, which while it covered the maths, it focussed on what was happening.

A very solid text in a subject that is impossible to cover well for every reader. It suited me well, and it still sits on my shelf as a very useful reference.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference work, difficult read for students
Review: The text is extremely dense and concise. The principles are developed almost axiomatically and assume the reader has fully digested earlier material. The concepts are developed in a highly abstract, mathematical way. This makes the text an extremely useful reference once you are familiar with the material, but it is quite difficult for students new to the material. The instructor has to work hard to expand and develop the conceptual material.

There are a number of worked examples with annotations explaning the solution. I found these examples quite helpful, however, there is not any material specifically focussed on problem solving skills.

The strength of this book is its extensive collection of excellent problems illustrated by easy-to-understand color figures. The problems draw on a wide range of real-world examples. Their concrete nature helps makes a Statics course seem relevant and interesting. The quality and scope of the problems easily exceeds that of most other texts. Many of the problems require the student to first figure out what they're being asked to calculate, an important real-world aspect of problem solving. One drawback is that a number of problems depend on fairly tricky geometrical reasoning, which tends to obscure the statics skills being practiced. Finally, there isn't any real attempt to introduce the computer to solving statics problems. As a consequence, there are no problems asking for judgements -- questions such as "at what angle is the force in the bar the least?" Similarly, the large number of simultaneous equations to be solved in some problems could be done more easily on the computer. However, instructors may prefer that students first become proficient solving the problems by hand before making computer-based solutions.

Overall, the problems make this a good text for an instructor to use, but they will have to work hard to help the students learn the concepts and problem solving skills needed to be successfull.

Rating:
Summary: TERRIBLE!
Review: This book...is terrible. My professor frequently points out that the author gives lousy explanations, and even worse proofs, for those who actually care about those. It makes me wonder why its even the book of choice at my supposedly top-notch school. The explanations are awful, and the sample problems aren't always clearly worked out. I'm not sure what is good about this book besides being done with it.