Engineering Dynamics

It is a good book! But Dynamics is a very hard subject.... It almost drove me crazy at the beginning....

good sale

This book is unfortunately so great yet so bad at the same time. The pros: - There are many, many examples and the author goes into great detail on his strategy on the examples. This makes the book a very good tool for self-study. - Probably the best clarification/discussion that is fair to both schools of thought concerning the overlap between Kane's equations and the Gibbs-Appell equations for nonholonomic systems. - Excellent new chapter 9 that includes Hamilton's principle with derivations of interesting problems in continuous systems in engineering. - Overall, re-written to be more student-friendly in comparison to second edition. Reorganized discussion on curvilinear coordinates and space curves very well. The cons: - Death by vectors. Vector heavy. Has a hard time letting go of Newtonian approaches. This reviewer is not a fan of continuing vector approaches at the graduate level as you begin to drift towards focusing on tree and leaves and missing the forest. This first 6 chapters are pedantic and exhausting and tend to obscure the big ideas in rigid body dynamics by insisting on a Newtonian approach. - Death by typos. Death by typos. Death by typos. This is the most disappointing aspect that really chips away at my first pro. This version appears to have been done with significant cut-and-paste jobs that leave numerous numbers wrong in example problems. The solution key is completely hosed. Answers in the solution key are wrong. Sadly, the enormous errata still misses a huge number of typos, many of which do not exist in the second edition and a scattered all over the example problems. The errata for the solution key is also incomplete. - The author has a habit of developing a general relation with respect to some subscript and then will build a theory off the idea for something else and switch his subscript to new ones. For the trained eye this is no big deal, but it really trips up/confuses students hitting the material for the first time. In summary, very mixed feelings on this book. Could have been "the" source for intermediate dynamics courses for engineers but ultimately has enough drawbacks that it slides into the already large and unsatisfactory pile of traditionalists textbooks in this area. Instructors are still better off with their own notes. Very excited about the new edition at first only to be continually disappointed. Wish the author had taken more time and care and worked more slowly with a greater attention to detail in this edition.

This book is good by itself. What I am not satisfied with is the the printing/binding quality---it is a Print-on-Demand(POD) copy produced by "Lighting Source UK Ltd."as indicated by a label on the page next to the back cover, which Amazon did not show with its description of the book they are selling. The text quality is worse than from a traditional publisher, with tiny black dots found peppered throughout pages. The binding quality is also not as good: the spine is non-flexible but made of same hard paper board as the covers, which once opened show big gap between the hard spine and the book block. I would suggest Amazon to show so in its description if a book is a POD one.