Customer Reviews

Vector Mechanics for Engineers: Statics and Dynamics (IBM Set)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I cannot deny the fact that this is a well-written book. But the authors had a way of getting on my nerves for the gradation between the examples and the exercise problems was too steep that if you did not grasp the underlying concept in the first place, you never ever will understand it. Most of my friends felt that way too.

However that does not mean that the book is not good. At times you will be flabbergasted at how well the authors can push a difficult concept through. The section on 'Dynamics' was perhaps one of the best in contemporary entry-level texts on the subject.

I was forced into purchasing this group of books for my university engineering program as all of the homework problems required were straight from this book.

Additionally, the books were packaged with schaums problem sets that were particularly useless (schaums outlines are usually excellent, but their problem sets did not contain all of the detail and had nothing extra to offer over Beer and Johnston's textbook) and therefore a waste of my money.

With that said, the only redeeming value of this book is the sheer number of exercises and answers (numerical answers with no explanation, however).

The writing quality suffers what english majors call overuse of passive voice. Overuse of the words "is," "will," "are," etc. characterize this style. With the lack of acting verbs in sentences, the book effectively numbs the mind and puts the reader to sleep. This passive use of verbage also serves to take the emphasis off of the important parts of sentences.

Aside from stylistic issues with the english language, the book also suffers from a lack of vision. The authors did not provide a good methodology to approaching problems at all. They hint at it, by telling the student to draw pictures. However, in examples, the authors jump from one step to the next without much explanation of how a person would discover the techniques themselves. This makes the homework problems particularly difficult when a completely different approach than the one in the examples is required.

There are also derivation and explanation issues. For instance, in the handling of the precession of free bodies (this example sticks out in particular), the author provides a diagram and some equations. However, students cannot precede merely from what the author explained. The student, in order to approach the problems, must assume the validity of the vector diagrams and their relationships, along with equations, seperately. The diagrams and equations WERE NOT UNIFIED in the discussion. This gives the impression that the authors seperately wrote different parts of the book, and later simply pasted the pieces together without any greater plan.

I would not recommend these books as something colleges should use.

This is really a great book in a hard to grasp subject.It is easy to follow ,has a lot of excellent sample problems and examples ,student-friendly and it is ideal for selfstudy.

This is the text used in my current undergrad Statics class. Like many of these texts, this book is written so only teachers or students who have already completed the course might understand the explanations and sample problems. If you have a teacher who does not explain the material in an understandable way, like I do, this book will be no help. There is no solutions manual to supplement the few examples given in the chapters.

I have had straight B's in 3 undergrad Phyisics courses, and 2 A's and 2 B's in 3 unergrad Calculus courses and Diff Eq. I am nearly lost with this book and looking for supplemental learning materials.

I must disagree with what the other reviewers have said. This book is the best book I have ever come across for Mechanics. The approach is pictorial and problem-solving techniques are marvellously illustrated. There is an enormous amount of well-graded problems, so if you cant solve one problem on your own then you have many more to try. A Bible for Mechanics.

Engineering mechanics is a hands-on course. It won't help you any good to read the textbook for 10 hours at a stretch if you don't attempt to understand the problem and solve it yourself. The best thing about this subject is that once you get the basics, you can pretty much read it on your own and understand everything. There are only three laws (thanks to Newton) and everything else is deduction. This book has lots of problems and they are very practical too. You can see most of the problems around you, like the one on a safety mechanism for a construction worker and there are many such problems. I am not in any way affiliated or related to the publishers or the authors. In summary, a great book for a TOUGH subject. (Yes it is tough because it is different from other subjects, where you can get by after cramming before an exam. E Mech. is the bread and butter of mechanical engineers, so you better understand it well)

Well, I'm not new to those authers. All their books represent one of the best in field, and their mechanics book is one of them. The text is well-organized, the material is presented professionaly, the problems help to understand and grasp the subject that you feel quite confident in your ability. A smart textbook. No one can recognize what he/she misses in engineering mechanics untill he/she has the opportunity to study this book.

This is honestly one of the worst written books that I have come across in my engineering courses.

The book really never explains any of the topics on more than a superficial level. If you don't understand the topic already, then you probably won't after you are done reading.

Thanks to this book I haven't a clue what moment or area of inertia is. The book never explains "what" it is. It just dishes out a formula, mentions something about applicability in certain circumstances and then expects the student to be able to tear the formula apart and apply it to a ton of different situations and homework problems, which are almost all extremely difficult.

The book simply makes too many assumptions about previous knowledge that as a first course for most engineers seems unreasonable.

As others have said this book is verbose. It takes far too long to explain some concepts, yet glosses over more complex material.

There need to be more worked out, and variety of examples. There are many problems, but often with no good example to start. It can be difficult to work beyond the very basic problems without consulting an external resource.

Bottom line: Don't buy as a bookshelf resource, only buy it if you have to.

Of all the text books I used throughout college as an electrical engineer student, this has to be the worst. First of all, this book does not abide by the usual convention for abbreviations of physical terms. For example, this book uses V for potential energy of a spring while we usually use U for potential energy. Secondly, a lot of the problems are written in English measuring system (lb, feet, inches, slugs) which makes solving problems exceptionally tedious. Finally, this book does a bad job of teaching the concept in the portion of the chapter before the problems. If you're not required to buy this textbook for a class, don't do it.