This book offers a unified presentation of the concepts and general principles common to all branches of solid and fluid mechanics, designed to appeal to the intuition and understanding of advanced undergraduate or first-year postgraduate students in engineering or engineering science.

The book arose from the need to provide a general preparation in continuum mechanics for students who will pursue further work in specialized fields such as viscous fluids, elasticity, viscoelasticity, and plasticity. Originally the book was introduced for reasons of pedagogical economy-to present the common foundations of these specialized subjects in a unified manner and also to provide some introduction to each subject for students who will not take courses in all of these areas. This approach develops the foundations more carefully than the traditional separate courses where there is a tendency to hurry on to the applications, and moreover provides a background for later advanced study in modern nonlinear continuum mechanics.

The first five chapters devoted to general concepts and principles applicable to all continuous media are followed by a chapter on constitutive equations, the equations defining particular media. The chapter on constitutive theory begins with sections on the specific constitutive equations of linear viscosity, linearized elasticity, linear viscoelasticity, and plasticity, and concludes with two sections on modern constitutive theory. There are also a chapter on fluid mechanics and one on linearized elasticity to serve as examples of how the general principles of the first five chapters are combined with a constitutive equation to formulate a complete theory. Two appendices on curvilinear tensor components follow, which may be omitted altogether or postponed until after the main exposition is completed.