Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Working from extensive market research and reviews of the 6th edition, the new 7th edition features reduced coverage of uncertainty and statistical methods. Statistics is now treated (in chapter 2) as one of several methods available to design engineers, and statistical applications are no longer integrated throughout the text, examples and problem sets.

Other major changes include updated coverage of the design process, streamlined coverage of statistics, a more practical overview of materials and materials selection (moved to chapter 3), revised coverage of failure and fatigue, and review of basic strength of materials topics to make a clearer link with prerequisite courses.

Overall coverage of basic concepts has been made more clear and concise, with some advanced topics deleted, so that readers can easily navigate key topics. Problem sets have been improved, with new problems added to help students progressively work through them.

The book has an Online Learning Center with several powerful components: MATLAB for Machine Design (featuring highly visual MATLAB simulations and accompanying source code); the "FEPC" finite element program, with accompanying Finite Element Primer and FEM Tutorials; interactive FE Exam questions for Machine Design; and Machine Design Tutorials for study of key concepts from Parts I and II of the text. Complete Problem Solutions and PowerPoint slides of book illustrations are available for instructors, under password protection. A printed Instructor's Solutions Manual is also available, with detailed solutions to all chapter problems.

Average Customer Rating:

Unsatisfactory

Customer Rating:

As an engineering student who is trying to learn and understand the concepts in this book, I have found it nearly impossible to get clear and concise explanations of the concepts covered in this book. Many of the examples are incomplete. They take short cuts and don't explain why they did what they did. This book makes WAY too many assumptions that you just magically already knew what they were talking about. For each chapter, I've had to go through and spend hours deciphering what in the world they were trying to say. There is little consistency in notation. The notation chosen doesn't always coincide with standard notation. They rarely clearly define the notation. Many of the figures are mediocre at best and poorly labeled. The concepts in this book are very important, so they need to be presented in a simple, easy to understand way. The concepts are not necessarily difficult, but they are difficult to learn from this book's explanations. From what I've heard, the next edition isn't much better if any. The editors need to work their way through this book and fill in the gaps, making sure everything is clearly illustrated, labeled, and explained.

Great book

Customer Rating:

This is the single most useful engineering design book I have found. It has a very broad scope of design information. As some of the other reviews have stated, it does not go into much depth in a lot of the subjects, but I have never come across a structural design problem I couldn't solve using this book. As a mechanical engineer, if I could only use one book as a reference, it would be this book.

A good book	Customer Rating:
A good general mechanical engineering reference book. Mechanical Engineering Design, by Shigley contains a wealth of useful reference information, but lacks clarity in a few subjects. It is a good quick reference book, not too big, and not too small for mechanical engineers, as it covered most of the important desgin topics. In general, the topics are easy to find and apply.

Mechanical Engineering Design	Customer Rating:
I have found having this book again useful and a great addition to my library.

good	Customer Rating:
Good book, alot of useful reference info but not too clear on a lot of subjects. A good machinery handbook I'd recommend instead.