ISBN9780132215091

this is the book required in my engineering mechanics class and its a pretty good book. has alot of examples and solutions to some of the practice problems. alot better deal than buying the two books separately even though this book is rather large it turns out its a good bit cheaper than buying them separately

I should preface this by saying that I am not a mechanical engineer. There may be important conventions for mechanical engineers illustrated in this book, but that I would not know.

It is better to think of this book not as a textbook but as a set of problems with some solutions. The "text" of this textbook is so poorly written that it is better treated as pointers to sections of your math or physics books you may need to review. The material and problems is not difficult, just poorly explained.

The author is sloppy with notation throughout the book, particularly the section on dynamics. It is not unusual for new notation to be introduced -- unexplained -- in an example or problem.

On that point, most books of this type contain answers to the odd numbered problems. This book is no different (and contains answers to some even ones as well) but is particularly fanatical about keeping this section's page count down. It is common for textbooks to avoid printing a graph for a problem that requires one and instead just list the equation. This book takes that one step farther and sometimes omits the equation in favor of a handful of arbitrary points. This is particularly ridiculous because (like most recent textbooks) the "text" is obstructed by an irrelevant parade of pictures and colored boxes (complete with drop shadows!).

My understand is that this series is infamous for containing many errors. The 9th edition had an egregious error in the first chapter on the SI system, for example. I noticed few outright errors (and on a second look most of those were just sloppiness) in this edition, but be warned.

Between the poor text, gratuitous drop-shadows, and general lack of care for the reader this book looks like it was printed for no reason other than killing the secondary market for the 10th edition.

I had to order this book for my Statics and Dynamics class at the University of Michigan. The book is decent but is nothing special. There are a great deal of practice problems and a sufficient amount of examples. The information is pretty clear but I feel it could be described in a better manner than made things easier to comprehend.