Ok, I have to get the elephant in the living room out of the way first. This text appears to be lecture notes printed verbatim, typos, ASCII art, MATLAB graphs, and Microsoft Word typesetting and all, and put into a paperback book. At first glance, when you open the book it isn't very impressive. Akin uses some non-standard notation (based on what I've seen in other textbooks and literature), which to me made it like reading ye olde English...it can be interpreted, but just not as quickly as I'm used to.

That aside, I found the book helpful. I studied it on my own to learn about adaptive finite elements. After and undergradute class, which barely brushes on the topic, and after a graduate class (I am in the early stages of my graduate studies), which took the "rigorous mathematical" stance and made the topic so damn esoteric and impossible to understand, I found Akin's treatment to be "just right," to quote Goldilocks. I have a much better understanding of both the theory and implementation of error-estimating in FEA.

Akin has a few other interesting chapters...he has a much better treatment on element interpolation that every other textbook I've seen. The examples are complicated enough to be in a FEA textbook but nowhere near useful. The structure of the book is a little confusing, and the chapters are unevenly balanced. In Akin's favor, the book isn't a collection of his papers, like most of the leaders in the field, and it is specifically written with seniors/early grad students in mind.

The book is interspersed with FORTAN snippets. The code is well-written (from an educational point of view, but kind of slow and sloppy otherwise), and well-commented. I'm of the opinion that FORTRAN needs to be put to bed, but old engineers won't ever let that happen. I think it would have been better to have code snippets in pseudocode...and by god, put the entire thing in an appendix and highlight important sections via notes in the margin. This isn't a programming book, but at times it seems that the entire focus is on Akin's FORTRAN code. If you're that worried about implementation, get the Cook/Malkus Concepts and Applications of Finite Element Analysis, 4th Edition text. Akin himself references it many times.

So, I think this is one to buy as a supplement to your class textbook. I have yet to come across a decent introductory FEA textbook (I know Reddy An Introduction to the Finite Element Method (Mcgraw Hill Series in Mechanical Engineering) has a lot of fans, but I don't agree with them). However, if you take bits and pieces from several books (this one included), you can get clear answers to any question.

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