Customer Rating: Summary: Useful tool Comment: This book gets its point across. It is a textbook and that is what it is supposed to do. It gives you everything you need to be successful in the class you are taking, though I only used the second half about the strengths of different materials. The first half, which is statics, could be really difficult to understand using this book, though it is a hard subject to understand period. Customer Rating: Summary: Fa-Hwa 2nd edition Comment: I have used the first edition and was generally pleased. The second edition, however, is unacceptable. The rewrite added a few interesting and a few less useful topics. The problems at the end of each section were changed but the answer key referred, in many cases, to the the first edition. Sometimes the solutions were large deviations from the stated problem. There were occasional proof reading errors, far too many for a major text. The students were frequently frustrated in their efforts to justify the answer to the problem as stated. Customer Rating: Summary: Price is not the best way to choose a text Comment: As a college instructor, I try to choose texts based on quality, but with consideration of price. I thought this book was a good compromise, but wish I had kept my previous text. This has way too many errors for a 2nd edition, and has received considerable critisism from my students for being hard to follow. There are better choices out there.