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 | | Engineering Mechanics , Dynamics (Engineering Mechanics) by J. L. Meriam, L. G. Kraige ISBN-10: 0471406457 ISBN-10: 0-471-40645-7 ISBN-13: 9780471406457 ISBN-13: 978-0-471-40645-7 Hardcover 2001-12-31 Wiley Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Concise and authoritative, this book set the standard for excellence in basic mechanics texts. The major emphasis is on basic principles and problem formulation. Strong effort has been made to show both the cohesiveness of the relatively few fundamental ideas and the great variety of problems that these ideas solve. All of the problems deal with principles and procedures inherent in the design and analysis of engineering structures and mechanical systems with many of the problems referring explicitly to design considerations. | ||
Reviews | ||
Not Helpful The text doesn't help at all. Half the time, proofs are done in the teacher's manual, but not in the text. The problems are not well correlated to the sections, buy another book if you're assigned this one, its horrible. | ||
Unclear Examples and Wrong Solutions While the text portions on the theory are mostly acceptable, there are two things that make this book very unhelpful. First, the example problems are not solved in terms of variables - numerical values are used from the beginning, which makes the example both hard to follow and less easily generalized to help the reader understand other problems. Second, the book provides solutions to the odd-numbered problems, but it was not uncommon for these solutions to be wrong (even the units were wrong!). This created a lot of frustration. A third minor complaint is that the book is not organized well - the chapters are far too broad (several are longer than 100 pages) and yet closely related material still sometimes appears in different chapters. | ||
Thorough and ample preparation Other reviewers have left their disgust of the book to a basic, if I may summarize, "it doesn't explain anything" carping. Now, of course, it should be understood that textbooks are a supplement to lecturing in a classroom setting, so, it should be without mentioning that learning material like dynamics would be rather difficult without an ample professor leading the way. With that said, I believe this text is amazing. It is simply one of the better texts I've gone through so far and not simply due to my advantage. My advantage being that my professor was L.G. Kraige, the co-author and future author of the 6th edition (the distinguished Dr. Merian passed away in 2000). Dr. Kraige never went far beyond the text or elaborated any further than what was provided. And rightfully so - if you are not able to pick up some of this material from what you read, it is best that you take a few steps back (maybe back to statics, maybe to physics, maybe to grade school) and start again. Dynamics is a difficult subject to move through without some form of official lecture and having someone offer their own tips and hints is a necessity for your individual success. The book is thorough and the appendices cover shades of older material that you may not remember fully - I know I had to review mass moments of inertia on several occasions and Appendix B was just enough to get me back on target. The problems for each article are very well formulated and clearly presented. As with many advanced texts, not all of the topics or questions are covered explicitly during the articles, but at this point in the physics/engineering game, it is a must for a student to begin to intuitively solve problems based on the basics that are presented. Again, this book is wonderful, but needs to be complemented with an ample professor. I was very lucky to have Dr. Kraige as my professor and appreciate the text all the more. | ||
useless text You'd better hope you've got a good professor for dynamics, because this book is absolutely no help. It gives proofs for most equations, but doesn't seem to think any amount of example problems are necessary. I have the bootleg copy of the solutions manual for this book and the author solves most of the problems with bizarre calculus that isn't discussed in the chapter at all. To top it off, the set (Statics and Dynamics) was $180 at my college bookstore. Pool your money with your classmates, buy one copy of each, and xerox the problems. You will not miss anything. | ||
Same quality as the Statics text (that is, low quality) The authors treat this topic with the same dense, obtuse, poorly worded approach they used to write the Statics text. If you ever want to use your textbook except to do assigned problems out of it (that is, you want to learn from it by reading it) don't expect it to help you much, if at all. | ||