 2008-03-26 - Terrible Book
What started off as a clear, concise text that fully explained basic concepts quickly degraded into a confusing and unhelpful text that seemed to assume you already knew the topics and treated it as a review. Example problems are completely worthless as Rao often skips dozens of steps at once, assuming the reader is already a pro at modeling complex physical systems. To make matters worse, there seems to be a distinct lack of explanations and plain definitions for many terms that are randomly introduced into the topic. Modal shapes, eigenvectors/eigenvalues, etc. are all introduced with little to no background information.
The only reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is because I could potentially see the book's value as a review text or reference, but as the main text for an introductory course on vibrations... Well, let's just say you better have a much better teacher than Rao is a writer.
 2006-03-01 - Best book for Vibration course of Master degree
This book in my point of view as a Master student in Mechanical Engineering is the best for Vibration. Examples are given with practical applications. You can find many interesting challenging problems at the end of each chapter. I found it much better than Thomson's book, as it explains the examples more clearly. Another postive point that I have found is the summeries given at the end of each section. They include many important issues related to that specific section.
 2005-12-10 - Not very useful
I found this book to be very hard to understand, and not very systematic. in some of the examples it is assumed that you know how to do all the math, or you understand entirely the thought process. Maybe there is not a better text, but compared to my other engineering text books, I would say this is one of the worst that i have used. It seems that it would be better for those who have a strong understanding of dynamics. Not introductory courses to the subject.
And again one of the largest drawbacks that i found was it did not have great examples, some were good, some were ok, but they did not cover the sections well in my opinion.
Also one of the most annoying things is a formula that we used extensively for 3 weeks was found in an example, not in the text where it should have been for those who don't fully examine the examples.
2003-01-10 - Not a good text
This book in my opinion is not the one to enjoy the beauty of the subject and mechanics in general. There is a vast amount of material amassed but the structure of the book is poor.
It seems being overburden with details and particulars and lacking unified clear consistent approach. In addition some mistakes are just plain annoying. If one wants to be serious about vibrations - do not sweat over this book. It can be just another somewhat usefull reference book to find some particular solution to for some particular problem.
Instead one can study mechanics with beautifully written classical L.Meirovitch, "Fundamentals of Vibrations" which is much more original, rigorous, clear, usefull and serious book to have.
2000-05-08 - Poor Book
I used this textbook for my Mechanical Vibrations course and was very displeased with it. My biggest gripe is the lack of examples in each chapter. There are an abundance of homework problems at the end of each chapter, but the vast majority of them are not illustrated at all in example problems. I noticed this immediately in Chapter 1 when attempting to solve several of the problems. The text also develops equations and formulas without detail and explanation. Luckily my teacher developed the eqations in class lecture and provided the majority of information for the course. While working out homework and test problems that were assigned, the book was of little use for me. I think the clarity of writing could be better, as well. By the way, I got an A in the course and still found the book to be poor.
|
