Engineering has its share of poorly-written books, and this is certainly one of them. Rather than give a clear, concise explanations, the authors instead focus on pointless derivations and other filler material that's of little use to the student. The result is a confusing mess that makes students like myself frustrated and stressed.



The problems are only compounded by the lack of examples. To me, in engineering books, examples are just as important as explanations because let's face it, engineering is *not* an abstract art. Its basis is the physical application of scientific theories to real-world problems. Sadly, this book's examples are all too limited in scope, explanation, and depth. The authors will derive equations for multiple sections and then have a single, brief, elementary example (where barely anything is explained and you're forced to become a psychic to determine their line of thought) and then expect you to do the exponentially more difficult problems in the back of each chapter. It's ridiculous.



When I first got the book, I thought it was interesting they were able to cram such an involved field into a relatively small book (~500 small-sized pages). Then you realize they were able to do such a feat by skipping over tremendous amounts of vital explanations and examples.



Be prepared to be flipping through the book constantly to refer back to formulas in various chapters, and also be prepared to scratch your head staring at terrible illustrations. Equations are also poorly labeled because when you're quickly flipping through the pages, it's quite difficult to see if an equation is one of importance, or simply an intermediate step in a derivation. Good books box their important or foundational equations (which of course means this book does not).



What's really sad is that poorly-written books like this one have the capability to turn an otherwise-enthused student off from a topic. Before taking a class where this book was the assigned reading, I was quite interested in advanced stress analysis. Now I look upon the subject with disdain because it seems like a big confusing mess.



I gave the book one star for two reasons: first, Amazon doesn't allow 0-star reviews, and second, perhaps the book would be of some use for reference, but as far as a text for learning the material, avoid at all costs!