This textbook has been prepared to support a course offering for Statics at the University of Nevada at Reno. Statics provides the first exposure of engineering students to the study of mechanics. While Statics is a relatively simple subject, many students find it difficult, and they often perform far below our expectations. In an effort to improve the curriculum, several members of the faculty at the University of Maryland have been working to enhance the student’s learning experience when studying the first two courses in mechanics. This textbook indicates some of the changes in the philosophy adopted by the faculty when presenting the subject matter traditionally offered in the first two introductory mechanics courses.

We began developing notes for this book with a pilot offering of this course in the spring semester of 1999. Many revisions were made before a limited first edition of the textbook was published in the summer of 1999. The second edition was published in 2000 and was used by about a thousand students. Six different versions of the Statics textbook have been published over the past 17 years. Over 10,000 students have studied this subject using these books. This edition includes homework problems following each of its 9 chapters, with a sufficient number of problems for student assignments for several semesters. Also the errors discovered during the extensive usage have been corrected; however, errors always occur even with careful proof reading by many diligent people. We would greatly appreciate students and instructors calling any errors they find to our attention. The e-mail address of one of the authors is given on the copyright page.

Special thanks are due to Dr. Ann-Marie Vollstedt for her assessment of the content, its sequencing and the need for emphasis on vectors and vector algebra.