Customer Reviews

Mechanical Vibrations (Addison-Wesley series in mechanical engineering)

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

 

 

I recently used this as a text to teach Vibrations to Mechanical Engineering seniors after Vibration Analysis by Vierck went out of print. I was attracted to Rao's book because much of the presentation is similar to Vierck. After using this text for one semester, I was not satisfied. I was particularly concerned by Chapter 2 where the fundamentals of damped single degree of freedom systems are covered. This Chapter is critical to building the foundation of Vibration Theory and I was disturbed to find that two critical plots, the time history comparison of responses with various damping levels and the phase plane plot for the same cases were seriously incorrect. While errors always can be found in texts, these plots were so obviously wrong at first glance that I wondered how a book with 29 reviewers (as listed in the Acknowledgements) has such glaring errors. As I progressed through the text I found a number of other errors including incorrect equations in some places. I also found that some material, emphasized in Vierck, that I consider important was buried in the worked examples rather than being emphasized as part of the book's text. While the book does present a lot of material and gives some interesting problems, I found that I was not comfortable with the text at the end of the course. I have since decided to drop this book from consideration as our text.

This book in my opinion is not the one to enjoy the beauty of the subject and mechanics in general. There is a vast amount of material amassed but the structure of the book is poor.
It seems being overburden with details and particulars and lacking unified clear consistent approach. In addition some mistakes are just plain annoying. If one wants to be serious about vibrations - do not sweat over this book. It can be just another somewhat usefull reference book to find some particular solution to for some particular problem.
Instead one can study mechanics with beautifully written classical L.Meirovitch, "Fundamentals of Vibrations" which is much more original, rigorous, clear, usefull and serious book to have.

I used this textbook for my Mechanical Vibrations course and was very displeased with it. My biggest gripe is the lack of examples in each chapter. There are an abundance of homework problems at the end of each chapter, but the vast majority of them are not illustrated at all in example problems. I noticed this immediately in Chapter 1 when attempting to solve several of the problems. The text also develops equations and formulas without detail and explanation. Luckily my teacher developed the eqations in class lecture and provided the majority of information for the course. While working out homework and test problems that were assigned, the book was of little use for me. I think the clarity of writing could be better, as well. By the way, I got an A in the course and still found the book to be poor.

I found this book to be very hard to understand, and not very systematic. in some of the examples it is assumed that you know how to do all the math, or you understand entirely the thought process. Maybe there is not a better text, but compared to my other engineering text books, I would say this is one of the worst that i have used. It seems that it would be better for those who have a strong understanding of dynamics. Not introductory courses to the subject.

And again one of the largest drawbacks that i found was it did not have great examples, some were good, some were ok, but they did not cover the sections well in my opinion.

Also one of the most annoying things is a formula that we used extensively for 3 weeks was found in an example, not in the text where it should have been for those who don't fully examine the examples.

On the surface, this text seems to cover everything and seems well-organized. However, further examination will reveal that it is often unclear and seems to skip or briefly mention many important subjects. Further, there are not nearly enough examples to convey the subject matter to the average undergraduate engineering student. Unfortunately, it has been my experience (after 6 years as a mechanical engineering student) that there are hardly any well-written texts on the subject of mechanical vibrations. This one only reinforces that notion.

This book is one of the worst I have ever read. Although it seems well structured and covers many materials, the overall content just overwhelms the undergraduate student will many details and forces them to lose the whole point. The bottomline: buy it if you're a professor and knows the materials. But don't buy it if you ever want to learn vibrations extremely extremely well. I have to go search for another text to understand really what is going on. Better off without it....other than using it as a hw problem book.

This book is one of the worst I have ever read. Although it seems well structured and covers many materials, the overall content just overwhelms the undergraduate student will many details and forces them to lose the whole point. The bottomline: buy it if you're a professor and knows the materials. But don't buy it if you ever want to learn vibrations extremely extremely well. I have to go search for another text to understand really what is going on. Better off without it....other than using it as a hw problem book.

What started off as a clear, concise text that fully explained basic concepts quickly degraded into a confusing and unhelpful text that seemed to assume you already knew the topics and treated it as a review. Example problems are completely worthless as Rao often skips dozens of steps at once, assuming the reader is already a pro at modeling complex physical systems. To make matters worse, there seems to be a distinct lack of explanations and plain definitions for many terms that are randomly introduced into the topic. Modal shapes, eigenvectors/eigenvalues, etc. are all introduced with little to no background information.

The only reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is because I could potentially see the book's value as a review text or reference, but as the main text for an introductory course on vibrations... Well, let's just say you better have a much better teacher than Rao is a writer.

This text was used during my senior year for two consecutive mechanical engineering courses I had at Penn State. I found the presentation of the material very thorough and logically ordered. My only issue with the book was when we dug into the first chapter. I was a bit overwhelmed because, although the first chapter is just an overview of vibration, it is very broad, yet detailed. All subsequent chapters were very well focused, easy to follow, and illustrative of important concepts.

I put the book away after graduation, but soon got it out again, finding that it is a wonderful tool in the field... definitely worth it.

I got the book in a reasonable amount of time. I got what i payed for and I am happy.