Textbook Review: Statics (Engineering Mechanics) 13th ed. Edition

 

Statics and its horrible sibling Dynamics were my two least favorite engineering subjects. They take the worst physics problems, make them harder, and then use them in an entire semester-long course. This book just covers the Statics material. There is a different edition that covers both Statics and Dynamics and one that just covers Dynamics.

How helpful the book will be to you depends on i) how good a teacher you have and ii) the kind of homework problems he or she assigns. Overall, I found that the theory was explained reasonably well, and the examples gave you a good idea of how to approach solving many of the problems in the problem sets. But, as pretty much every math, science, and engineering textbook does, this one does have problems in the problem set that are much harder than the examples in the chapter text. If your professor assigns the harder problems and/or is not easy to follow, you will probably need to get a study guide to supplement the textbook. But, if you have a pretty decent teacher who assigns problems from the chapter that are similar in difficulty to the examples in the chapter text or that are shown during lecture, then the book will give you a pretty good understanding of the material and you can probably understand it without any additional supplements or study guides.