Product Description
Now available from Waveland Press, this outstanding text offers a comprehensive treatment of the principles of the mechanical behavior of materials. Appropriate for senior and graduate courses, Mechanical Behavior of Materials is distinguished by its focus on the relationship between macroscopic properties, material microstructure, and fundamental concepts of bonding and crystal structure. The current, second edition retains the original edition’s extensive coverage of nonmetallics while increasing coverage of ceramics, composites, and polymers that have emerged as structural materials in their own right and are now competitive with metals in many applications. It contains new case studies, includes solved example problems, and incorporates real-life examples. Because of the book’s extraordinary breadth and depth, adequate coverage of all of the material requires two full semesters of a typical three-credit course. Since most curricula do not have the luxury of allocating this amount of time to mechanical behavior of materials, the text has been designed so that material can be culled or deleted with ease. Instructors can select topics they wish to emphasize and are able to proceed at any level they consider appropriate. Outstanding features: 1) includes a large number of chapter problems that range in difficulty from straightforward to challenging; 2) offers extensive figure captions with relevant information that makes it easier for students to study the figure without referring back to the text; 3) incorporates a less-formal, refreshing writing style readers will appreciate; and 4) opens with a brief overview chapter on the concepts of mechanics and strength of materials, which serves as a refresher for some students and as a source for reviewing macroscopic concepts as they are introduced throughout the book.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 3 reviews)

Decent text, but could use more examples

This was required text for a masters level material science class. Overall the book is well written and fairly easy to understand. The problems at the back of the text are on the challenging side to difficult. Some of the problems don't seem to relate to the text well.
October 13, 2007

Difficult Book

The book lacks in detail explanation of steps in deriving equations and of the concepts. The book expects it's readers to have a complete understanding of several other subjects.
September 28, 2007

Comprehensive, covers the subject well

There are many books on the market that deal with mechanical behavior of materials. Two of the better ones I've seen are Hertzberg and this one by Courtney. What distinguishes Courtney's book from the others is that I feel that he's written his book with a certain sympathy toward the student, and he covers nonmetallic materials, as well as metals, in depth. To illustrate the first point, Courtney's figure captions are extensive, about a paragraph long on average. This makes it easier to study the figures, since they're all described in depth in the captions. You don't have to look at the text to find the information relevant to the figure. This makes it easier on the reader. Also, in some sections his writing style takes on an informality that's refreshing, as if he were in the room lecturing to you. Too many textbooks resort to stilted phrases such as "The reader should . . ." or studiously avoid using the word "you" for fear of bridging some imagined wall between author and reader. Professor Courtney would have none of that. As for my second point, Courtney covers metals, ceramics and polymers, as well as composite materials and cellular solids. I would fault the book only for the poor reproduction quality of many of its figures; they're legible but look as though they've been scanned in at very low resolution. I would also have liked a more comprehensive subject index. But overall, I recommend this book as one of the best in a field loaded with textbooks.
February 12, 2000

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Thermodynamics in Materials Science, Second Edition
by Robert DeHoff

INTRODUCTION TO THE THERMODYNAMICS OF MATERIALS, FOURTH EDITION
by David Gaskell

Phase Transformations in Metals and Alloys, Second Edition
by David A. Porter, Kenneth E. Easterling

Introduction to Dislocations, Fourth Edition
by Derek Hull, D J Bacon

Physical Properties of Crystals: Their Representation by Tensors and Matrices
by J. F. Nye