Customer Reviews

Principles of Soil Dynamics (PWS-Kent Series in Engineering)

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I have been using this book as a text for soil dynamics elective course. This book provides sound mathematical backing with relevant practical examples in each section. Students have found this book very useful as they can find examples followed by each derivation. Without hesitation, I would say that this is the only decent book available in the market for the first course in soil dynamics. I would, however, suggest the author to separate "geophysical soil exploration" section from the chapter that describes "Properties of dynamically loaded soil" to avoid confusion.

I purchased this book and have read about 30 percent of it in detail and found that it was put together in a sloppy manner. I am very upset at the publisher and Das for putting out such sloppy work and charging $160. Parts of the book are pretty good, but without carefully going through derivations or checking sources, I am hesitant to take anything in the book at face value. The book is supposedly copyrighted in 2011, but many of the topics in the book have not been updated since the first version of Das' book was published in the early 80's. BTW, I hear that the earlier version is better than the 2011 version. There are dozens if not hundreds of errata, grammar errors, and typos in this book, I haven't wasted my time to find all of them , but here are some examples that I have observed while reading the book:


Page 35, eqn 2.91, the equation should use the term cZ' not cZ"

Page 303, for the modified Mercalli scale the word "laster" is used instead of "plaster"

Page 78, compression waves are referred to as "comparison waves"

Page 169, table 4.4 "comparison waves"

Page 172, the octahedral stress is defined as 1/2 (sigma1+sigma2+sigma3)instead of 1/3 (sigma1+sigma2+sigma3)

Page 77, equation 3.65 should have the term d2w/dxdz, not d2w/dxdy

Page 116, Figure 4.17, strain is reported as 10^4 instead of 10^-4

Page 305, table 7.3 is outdated, check USGS, isn't the copyright date 2011?

Page 68, the dx2 and dt2 are switched in the bottom portion of the differential operator in eqn 3.42

Page 115, wrong tense of the verb "use"

Page 30, subscript 2 should be superscript 2 indicating "squared" for eqn's 2.75 a and b

Copyright page, "ourt" instead of "our"

pages 56 and 57, use of the word "nation" instead of "notation"

.....many more, but I think you get the point.

The book has dealt with most of the practical problems and quite useful for every Engineer who so ever dealing with machine foundations design and Geotechnical problems