Customer Reviews

Mechanical Behavior of Materials

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There are many books on the market that deal with mechanical behavior of materials. Two of the better ones I've seen are Hertzberg and this one by Courtney. What distinguishes Courtney's book from the others is that I feel that he's written his book with a certain sympathy toward the student, and he covers nonmetallic materials, as well as metals, in depth. To illustrate the first point, Courtney's figure captions are extensive, about a paragraph long on average. This makes it easier to study the figures, since they're all described in depth in the captions. You don't have to look at the text to find the information relevant to the figure. This makes it easier on the reader. Also, in some sections his writing style takes on an informality that's refreshing, as if he were in the room lecturing to you. Too many textbooks resort to stilted phrases such as "The reader should . . ." or studiously avoid using the word "you" for fear of bridging some imagined wall between author and reader. Professor Courtney would have none of that. As for my second point, Courtney covers metals, ceramics and polymers, as well as composite materials and cellular solids. I would fault the book only for the poor reproduction quality of many of its figures; they're legible but look as though they've been scanned in at very low resolution. I would also have liked a more comprehensive subject index. But overall, I recommend this book as one of the best in a field loaded with textbooks.

Courtney has put together a nice survey of the various fields of (classical) materials science, from basic elasticity up through the mechanisms of plasticity, fracture, and so on. He covers these topics for metals, polymers and composites, and ceramics. The captions on the figures are a beautiful, beautiful thing. You can easily gain a decent understanding/review of the material by just flipping through a chapter and reading the paragraph-long captions on each of the figures- in fact, that was how I studied for my exams.

The book very much lacks examples, with perhaps only two or three half-page examples per chapter. I think the end-of-chapter problems were just a quick afterthought after the text was written. I think there are only 10 figures "new" for this book; Courtney pulled figure after figure after figure from the literature and/or other mechanics of materials books. The vast majority of the derivations in the text skip steps- a lot of steps- which makes them hard to follow. Courtney tries to discuss a lot of topics, which is fine, but sacrifices the necessary depth so that readers may gain sufficient understanding of the material. Frankly, if you want to learn about dislocations, pick up Hull and Bacon's book Introduction to Dislocations, Fourth Edition or any of the other texts entirely on dislocations.

I can't really recommend this text. Broad-brush survey books certainly have their place and proper usage, but I think this book is really lacking on substance.

Apendix and Index are not helpful.
the chapters seem to be missing info.
No answers in the back of the book.
avoid this one..

This book is a thick booklet of formulae with lots of text whose original derivations are nearly never explained. It is full of statements such as "a comprehensive treatment yields" followed by a formula that came out of nowhere (The treatment is never shown). It could have been a much better book if more derivations of the relations were shown instead of writing pages and pages of how this determines that and etc.. If you want to learn Mechanical Behavior just like memorizing important dates in a history class, you can use this book. If you want to really know the origins of the relations, especially in fracture and high temperature deformation, I suggest you look into other options. I wonder if the author himself knows how the majority of the formulae are derived. He just pulls out many of the formulae out of nowhere and this is not the way to nurture the curious materials scientist.

This book lacks the depth and rigor necessary for the specialist, while being far too lengthy to serve as a useful reference for the general materials scientist.

I bought this book for a course on mechanical behavior, and immediately found it exhausting to read due to its long winded discussions. A flip through the book is enough to see the problem. Courtney will often go multiple pages without a single equation. I honestly can't critique much of the content specifically because I've never been able to survive more than a few paragraphs before beginning to skim, and soon returning the book to my shelf.

If you've even had a basic materials course, I think you'll become bored with the lengthy explanations of concepts, many of which are fairly intuitive in the first place. And you won't find much in the way of detailed or interesting derivations.

Some people might consider this book highly readable, but for me, a major criterion for readability is feeling that my time is being well spent. In that sense, a page full of equations could very well seem far more readable than the sea of text that is Courtney's book.

I read the book from the first page to the end; this book is written in simple yet comprehensive text; I really liked this one better than Dowling's (Mechanical Behavior of Materials (3rd Edition)). The book by Courtney mostly concerns the Mechanical Behavior of Materials from a materials science point of view; however, Dowling's book is more of a solid mechanics approach to materials behavior. It has a comprehensive overview of dislocations, plasticity and strengthening mechanisms; fracture and creep are discussed in details; however, the fatigue part has room for more details. Non-metallics, composites, and polymers parts are not very in-depth but are more than enough for an introductory materials behavior course. I think the only advantage of Dowling's book over this one is the fatigue part, which is discussed in more details in Dowling.

Overall, I really recommend this book; the text is so well written that I could read the whole book on my own.

This was required text for a masters level material science class. Overall the book is well written and fairly easy to understand. The problems at the back of the text are on the challenging side to difficult. Some of the problems don't seem to relate to the text well.

The book lacks in detail explanation of steps in deriving equations and of the concepts. The book expects it's readers to have a complete understanding of several other subjects.