Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Applied Dynamics Revised Printing

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This is a great book for dynamics!

There are a lot of useful examples for every chapter, and the author goes into detail on a lot of the mathematical derivations that is used frequently throughout the book.

A cautionary note though: This book is not for beginners!

If you do not have a strong physics background and math background, this book is not for you since the material might be too advance. Otherwise, if you're comfortable with classical mechanics as well as using symbolic algebra and calculus, then this dynamics book might be just for you.

I took a Dynamics course this summer from a terrific professor. We used this book, and I found it very mixed. On the one hand, it does a much better job than many "intro" books at including advanced topics in it (Lagrangians, for instance), and in a way that can make a certain amount of sense. On the other, the writing oscillates (hah!) between moderately acceptable and opaque. Particularly in Ch. 8, much of the text requires you to understand the topics before the writing can be understood. On the other hand, also in Ch. 8, are some terrific short summary sections on single-degree of freedom oscillatory systems. So it's not all bad.

The arguably single worst thing about the text is the solutions manual. Calculus and algebra that take several pages for the student to do are skipped over with a sentence like "applying equation 6-15 to equation 6-23, we come up with..." the solution. Well, gee, I never would have thought of that, given that the problem says "Use equation 6-15 to show that..."

The second worst thing about it is the print quality. The first edition had two-color illustrations, but they had some errors in them. The errors are fixed in the 2nd edition, but the two-color printing was replaced with an absolutely terrible black halftone, where important information in some illustrations, esp. problems, is absolutely impossible to see. Several problems in ch. 3 were utterly unsolvable until I saw the versions in the 1st ed.

Bottom line is, in the hands of a skillful teacher, this book will not be an obstacle, and may be a modest help to learning some serious, advanced Dynamics at the introductory level. But may God have mercy on the souls of anyone trying to use this book to teach themselves, or to overcome a bad professor, for author Williams shall have none!

I am an Engineering student and this book has too much derivations it does not have many problems for civil engineering and is more theoretical.