This is a wonderful book to add to your collection, although filled w/ a majority of pictures that you may have already seen (a few you may have not seen), it is a wonderful collection and great to see them all together!

I'm enjoying reading this book and am learning all sorts of neat things about an area I love visiting. Since at the time I last studied the French and Indian wars I'd never even been to NY, it has a fresh relevance to me.

When you purchase it, however, be sure and purchase detailed maps for the region between Montreal and Quebec and south to Albany. The tiny map at the beginning of the book does little to orient anyone not already intimately familiar with the area.

The story of Floyd Olson's career is fascianting, but I think he could have had a better researcher and biographer than this book evidences.

I cannot deny the fact that this is a well-written book. But the authors had a way of getting on my nerves for the gradation between the examples and the exercise problems was too steep that if you did not grasp the underlying concept in the first place, you never ever will understand it. Most of my friends felt that way too.

However that does not mean that the book is not good. At times you will be flabbergasted at how well the authors can push a difficult concept through. The section on 'Dynamics' was perhaps one of the best in contemporary entry-level texts on the subject.

Well, I'm not new to those authers. All their books represent one of the best in field, and their mechanics book is one of them. The text is well-organized, the material is presented professionaly, the problems help to understand and grasp the subject that you feel quite confident in your ability. A smart textbook. No one can recognize what he/she misses in engineering mechanics untill he/she has the opportunity to study this book.

Engineering mechanics is a hands-on course. It won't help you any good to read the textbook for 10 hours at a stretch if you don't attempt to understand the problem and solve it yourself. The best thing about this subject is that once you get the basics, you can pretty much read it on your own and understand everything. There are only three laws (thanks to Newton) and everything else is deduction. This book has lots of problems and they are very practical too. You can see most of the problems around you, like the one on a safety mechanism for a construction worker and there are many such problems. I am not in any way affiliated or related to the publishers or the authors. In summary, a great book for a TOUGH subject. (Yes it is tough because it is different from other subjects, where you can get by after cramming before an exam. E Mech. is the bread and butter of mechanical engineers, so you better understand it well)

Imagine a book title "Applied Multivariate Statistics" that does NOT include ANYTHING about Principal Components or Factor Analysis. If you've been looking for such a book, this is the one for you.

However, if you're looking for a text with details about running PCA or Factor Analysis using the SAS system, continue looking!!!!

DB

The authors gave a short tutorial on the book at the Deming conference last year. I enjoyed the presentation and the book which is not expensive was discounted. I met both authors. They are experts in multivariate analysis having studied under C. R. Rao at Pittsburgh. The book provides lots of SAS code and does a good job of explaining how to set-up the analysis in SAS which would not be straightforward from the SAS manuals. The authors discuss diagnostics and with most concepts they explain them first for univariate problems and then show you how it is extended to the multivariate case. It is also one of the few books that deals with multivariate outliers. Outliers can be difficult to detect in regression and high dimensional multivariate data. I have some research experience in the area of outlier detection and can appreciate the way the authors deal with it.

I picked this book up recently because I like the Indian Wars and saw "Savas" on the spine. I have every one of their books, and all of them are of high quality and wonderful. I also have the Titanic and Alamo books in this series, which are both great. Man, is this one a lot different than all the others. The organization is just awful. The "facts" are set out one after another: "Fact #766," and then "Fact #767" and so on. What a nutty idea. It makes the entire book mechanical and pedantic.

The writing is also ploddy and unexciting. Really, REALLY dry. Many entires read as if they were just keyed in--and are lifted almost verbatim from other books. Without an index, no footnotes, and about 75% of the entries worthless tidbits of information, why was this book published? I guess every good publishing company lays an egg now and again.

This book is a disappointment in that it has three very serious flaws: 1. Aprroximately 200 of the 1876 facts in this book are nothing more than a listing of the birthplaces of members of the 7th Cavalry, or aliases they enlisted under. Now who cares! 2. Not more than one in thirty of the 1876 facts are referenced! If you want to check out a specific fact in this book by checking the source, you will have no idea what reference in the bibliography Mr. Russell got the fact from! 3. It has no index, which is always a huge handicap for any non-fiction book. This leaves the question "What audience is this book intended for?" It has too many details for LBH beginners, and cannot serve as a reference for the serious LBH student.

Some of the 'facts' mentioned tend to dispute one another and seems that the author just wandered from book to book without looking up any real information. Considering that the last ten years yielded a wealth of information that the author ignored especially about the type of weapons carried by the seventh cavalry. Shame on you Mr. Russell for this sham.

Without doubt, this is the worst textbook I ever had the misfortune to read.

I used it for a rushed 1st year dynamics course, and found the book utterly useless. The concepts are scattered and are introduced using complicated mathematics, some of which is beyond 1st year level. Even simply trying to read through the verbal explanations is near impossible for beginner students, simply because of the depth of knowledge required to do so.

The problems, while plentiful, are simply too difficult. Original thinking is one thing, these problems require something else entirely. I realise, of course, that textbooks must be challenging in order to maintain academic standards, but this book goes too far, to the point where students end up discouraged from the subject simply because the concepts are so difficult.

While I maintain the greatest respect for Mr Beer, as I am sure that he is a brilliant engineer (his book is testament to that), the text is simply too in-depth. For future editions, I recommend that he go through the book and greatly simplify both the language and the problems.

Until this book is simplified, I recommend the Hibbler Dyanmucs text to any other students out there.

If you ever have pleasure in taking this class, procede to the nearest gun shop and pick a fight with billy. He will know what to do. You engin-i-nerd.

Very few books provide solid material like this one (Meriam's is an excellent one too). In fact I have become interested in mechanics after I was Introduced to this text for the 1st time in 1984. Recently, I started to collect and work all the editions of this book. This text requires a skilful instructor that can present the material in a way worthy of this text. please do not hate this text if you really want unsurpass knowledge in mechanics, because there are many "engineering mechanics" texts around you that teach nothing.