fantastic high level text
10/19/2007
I teach the honors section of combined Statics and Mechanics of Materials course at Penn State University. This book is fantastic. The students love it. It is both pretty and clearly written. The problems and examples are at a consistent level of difficulty, and the full range is covered. One drawback is that vectors are covered but not emphasized to the extent of component methods. I do not use the electronic resources because they are locked inside a Flash program making it difficult to adapt them to my lectures.
Almost Useless
1/2/2008
This is the worst book I have had to use so far in my studies as an engineer. The chapters are all extremely short ranging from 1-4 pages which means that it is very dense, concise, and rather hard to fully understand. The examples are all too simple compared to the homework problems to be useful and they do not fully explain how they get each answer. Homework problems range from easy to extremely difficult but they get hard real fast. The book gives the answers to all odd problems, but if you don't know how to do the problems, they're pretty useless.
About the only good thing for this book is the fact that the homework problems are so hard that if you do fully master them and are able to complete them quickly and without help, you really don't need to worry too much about your exams.
I you're required to get this book for your class I suggest getting a reference book to go with it or just study for a really long time.
Very confusing book
4/7/2008
I bought this book for my statics class, it is very confusing. Important and non-important things are mixed together so you don't even know what you should focus on. Example problems take some time to figure out, because not all the details are shown. All of the 'actual' problems are harder than the examples, which means solving them will take some luck and a lot of hours. Only the odd numbers have answers shown. There is no solutions manual, so if your stuck, you will stay stuck. The good thing is, though, the back of the book includes a lot of formulas regarding statics so it can be easily used as a reference.