Description

This easily understood and very affordable text focuses on essential material likely to be covered in a single course in Statics for civil and other engineering majors. It employs and stresses a uniform and consistent approach or recipe (that is logical and orderly) for solving problems. It emphasizes as part of the general solution method, as well as a communication tool, the use of the free body diagram; and provides, within the body of the text, in-depth explanations of theoretical underpinning of important concepts and solution constructs. The book features a large number of problems for practice, in three categories: (1) regular or Practice problems with the answers provided directly below the problem statement, (2) Tutorial practice problems which not only have their answers provided directly below the problem statement but are fully explained and solved in an Appendix, and (3) Assignment problems for which no answers are provided within the text. Another Appendix of the text contains a review of crucial background material from Algebra, Calculus and Analytic Geometry. The final chapter of the text introduces design and use of computational tools in design; and a 2D linear structural analysis program, based on MATLAB® and available with purchase of the book, which may be employed in carrying out a number of practical design projects included in the text. The program (LSA2D) can be called from the user’s own m-files or executed from the MATLAB® command window. A companion interactive GUI program (LSA2Dgui) which is downloaded together with LSA2D, may be used to sketch a structural model in the MATLAB® graphics window and solve it with LSA2D.