What a great investment! The first chapter gives an excellent overview of the "why?" of composites. Chapters 2-end give you everything you every needed to know about composite mechanics (at least at the senior undergraduate level.)

With this book, I learned the material and passed the course quite easily.

Complaint: Like most textbooks, it gives very little coverage of computer modelling. Some, but not as much as I would have liked. It helped me pass the concept parts of the course, but I had to sink-or-swim on my own when it came time to write code.

Other than that complaint, this is an excellent introductory book.

8 of 9 found the following review helpful:


Good reference book  Dec 02, 2002
I find this book to be a very handy reference. Sometimes the equations get very involved, but I do like the way the material is presented. The font is kinda wierd (newest edition), but thats just a subjective thing for me. I also like the design section in the back, and the depth of information on design considerations is neat. Including this book, Swanson's analysis book is another good addition for joggling your memory on composite analysis that you took in grad school. :)

2 of 2 found the following review helpful:


A must have  May 16, 2008 By Carlos Roldan Vazquez
This book is just the bible for the stress analyst working with composites.
A must have at your bookshelf.


A good resource book  Oct 28, 2011 By J. Chien "Enginerd"
This is not the easiest textbook I've ever used, but with a class, I was able to use it as a reasonable reference book. I've heard that this is actually one of the better books, which makes me wonder about the other books...


A "Dan Brown" type techincal book?  May 18, 2011 By Tony Aimer
I found this book to be one of those that are hard to put down and I thourougly enjoyed reading through it. That is why I put it on a par with one of Dan Brown's epic novels like "angels and demoms". I even told the guests at a dinner party recently that I was enjoying this book which really caused a bit of a stir! I still need to go back and extract the really useful stuff. Let me give you some background about myself so you can see if you might also find it very valuable. I have been a self employed consulting structural enginner for 40 years designing structures for buildings in steel, concrete, brickwork and timber. I have no experience of fibre composite materials and I plan to get into this field for large radio controlled model aircraft. I have graduate experience in the stiffness method of analysis and wrote my own truss, frame and grid programs for an Apple II machine before the IBM PC was invented in 1983. Having read through this book I feel empowered to start on some of the other design texts with a little bit of confidence in how much I don't know, given how much the composite industry as a whole does not seem to really know. I would recommend this book unreservedly as the best technical book I have ever purchased - and I do have a very large library of structrual texts!

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