mechanical

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.

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.

I recently used this as a text to teach Vibrations to Mechanical Engineering seniors after Vibration Analysis by Vierck went out of print. I was attracted to Rao's book because much of the presentation is similar to Vierck. After using this text for one semester, I was not satisfied. I was particularly concerned by Chapter 2 where the fundamentals of damped single degree of freedom systems are covered. This Chapter is critical to building the foundation of Vibration Theory and I was disturbed to find that two critical plots, the time history comparison of responses with various damping levels and the phase plane plot for the same cases were seriously incorrect. While errors always can be found in texts, these plots were so obviously wrong at first glance that I wondered how a book with 29 reviewers (as listed in the Acknowledgements) has such glaring errors. As I progressed through the text I found a number of other errors including incorrect equations in some places. I also found that some material, emphasized in Vierck, that I consider important was buried in the worked examples rather than being emphasized as part of the book's text. While the book does present a lot of material and gives some interesting problems, I found that I was not comfortable with the text at the end of the course. I have since decided to drop this book from consideration as our text.