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cynicusrex's review against another edition
4.0
Definitely read this book if you're planning on building things; memorize it if you're planning on building things in public.
adellama_05's review against another edition
4.0
Great book, interlaced with stories, teaches you cool stuff that you didn't know you wanted to know about all sorts of structures: compression (masonry buildings), tension (boiler shells, bows), how stress and strain basically works, how joints fail, beams, torsion forces, the ways of buckling in compression. It sounds boring listed but it's not boring in the book. I really like the abundance of diagrams and plates.
Would definitely recommend.
Would definitely recommend.
sl4u's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.0
Good engineering knowledge and information for an introduction to the subject. Author is incredibly racist and British, sometimes makes wildly presumptuously statements about things outside his topic of expertise. I would have preferred a straight textbook, but that's my bad for choosing this book.
eat_a_tron's review against another edition
3.0
Overall a pretty decent (and charmingly British) overview of structural engineering. This book is starting to show its age, and some of his commentary is a little...old-fashioned. For example, his tossed-off comment that "Africans never invented the wheel". Yikes.
jamespaden's review against another edition
4.0
This is a hard read. I could read about five pages in a setting, but the topic is fascinating so I keep going. The first half of this book is intriguing. I might skip the second half. It just became too technical and it was harder for me to keep my interest. All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone who, like me, kept looking at buildings and other structures and asking: "how does that stay up?" Now I know!