Customer Reviews

Applied Dynamics: With Applications to Multibody and Mechatronic Systems

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It is an introductory book for Applied Dynamics. Don't buy it as a basic book on dynamics, for that there are the standard books like Methods of Analytical Dynamics by Meirovitch , Classical Dynamics by Greenwood and many others. It can serve however as an introduction to Multi-Body dynamics, especially as an introductory book to Kane's Dynamics or to Wittenburg's Dynamics of Systems of Rigid Bodies. It presents the common methods and it gives some good examples. But the book jumps from one subject to another quite inconsistently. It looks like the author pasted sections from few books and didn't invest the energy to unify it. For example, he presented Wittenburg's incidence matrix, gave an incomplete and too simple example and jumped to a different method. The part of orbital dynamics is too trivial, has nothing to do with the rest of the book and in my opinion should not be there at all.
On the other hand, he doesn't mention Quaternions and other attitude representations, and the treatment of transformation matrices is insufficient.
But worst, the book is full with typos and I had hard time to follow examples until I realized that the problem is with the book. I don't understand why classical books like by Whittaker or even by Meirovitch are typo free while new books are so lousy. There is a very nice book on Multi-Body dynamics by Amirouche, but it is terrible in terms of errors and inconsistency in notations. It could be a beautiful book if he just invested more time.
To conclude, there are some nice representative examples; especially it presents nicely the virtual power approach to Multi-Body dynamics, but it is a disappointment for readers with analytical mind and solid math background who expect something more meticulous.