Customer Reviews

An Introduction to the Mechanics of Solids

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I am surprised to see no reviews for this great book. This is one of those books which will be totally over your head the first time around. But if you don't lose heart and keep at it, you will realise it is a treasure trove. The style is extremely concise. What is said in 20 pages in other books gets about 5 pages, but beautifully. Read a sentence,contemplate over it and you will get it. Some of the example problems and explanations are so practical and simple, you will wonder why you should ever read another book. But you will need another book before this book starts to make any sense.

I studied this book 34 years ago, and remember it as my favourite text, even though I never applied much of the material (I ended up going into environmental, not structural engineering.) Many engineering texts are a collection of theorems and facts put together in a more or less systematic fashion, but without a clear underlying story or thread. 34 years later I still remember the logic of this text and its power: balancing forces, understanding and respecting geometric constraints, and understanding and applying "constitutive relations", the relationships between forces and deformation. This book explained that logic and applied it consistently through a variety of interesting examples, including bone structure as well as I beams. In addition, it illustrated the art of approximation in engineering as an art...you try it, you see what it tells you, and if it doesn't make sense you try again. It tells a clear and memorable technical story. I won't be buying a copy from Amazon because I have still kept my original, but I believe the book is not only a technical classic, but a model for those of us who want to see how a textbook should be written.