Structural Engineering Reference Manual Paperback – Nov 1 2011

This is by far the best book for studying for the vertical forces day of your structural PE test. Outside of the code books (ACI, AISC, etc) it is about the only book you need for the first day of the exam. The author has another book for the lateral day, though it is not as good as this one in its format and layout. This book is also fairly useful in your day to day structural engineering activities. Honestly if I had this book in college it likely would have helped then too.

If you truly study this book cover to cover and understand everything in it in addition to the reference codes and material standards you will pass the first day of the structural PE exam. One more thing is also necessary though, speed. You have to work fast to complete everything on the exam in the time allotted. This book helps with that as it is concisely laid out by material and then by design concepts. For example all of concrete is in one section, it then breaks it down by beam design for bending, beam design with compression steel, shear, etc. Each design concept section defines the variables at the front describes all the equations and concepts and then gives an example. There is a lot of content on a single page with 3 columns and a smaller font. it makes the book very concise and very useable in test environment. I would LOVE for this guy to rework his lateral forces book to be more like this formatting and layout style. With regards to the lateral forces day of the exam you will still be using this book for some of your material design, but this book is not sufficient for calculating the lateral loads themselves. This guys other book is very helpful in that regard. Additionally you will need to know ASSHTO wind design, with only ASSHTO seismic briefly being covered in this book.

In short if you are taking the structural vertical forces PE exam, buy this book first. Study it and pass the exam.

Best structural design book out there, getting this and the relevant codes, good enough for the PE afternoon. Well, I don't know about the SE yet. A few minor errors but otherwise fine. Just passed the PE and this book had a great role in that.

If you're looking to take the SE II exam, this book shouldn't be your only source. It covers a few unique situations for concrete beam design and foundation design that are good references, but overall it's a light reader on general capacity calculation concepts for various materials. I used this to recap wood design, as well as to learn masonry design. There are no useful examples of masonry or shear wall design, however... so look elsewhere for anything but concepts.

Also, the steel examples are riddled with mistakes. This item cost a lot for its actual worth.

I just took my exam 3 days ago so I wanted to write this review while it's still fresh in my mind. Overall, this book is extremely helpful and well worth the money. If you don't know how to begin in studying for the SE exam, this book will get you started on the right track. This was my main study guide for the exam and got priority seating on the table during the examination. One of the first things Alan Williams tells you in this book is that an effective study session should take about 300 hours! This is no joke! The exam covers so much information that I don't know how you could do a thorough study session with any less.

My main gripes with the book were related to the fact that there was no cold-formed steel review section and that the Bridge Section of the book was really skimpy. You could tell that this book really catered to building design. If you don't know the AASHTO code, this book will not suffice as a sole-source bridge study guide. It should have put more emphasis on live load distribution analysis. It also didn't even mention wind loads or stream load pressures on bridge piers, design or analysis of abutments or columns. Also, AASHTO has its own unique way of analyzing soil retaining structures which wasn't mentioned in this book. In actuality, the bridge section probably needed to be 3 times bigger than the book allotted for. Fortunately, I am a bridge engineer so I was familiar with all this stuff. I can only imagine what other people who don't know AASHTO were thinking.

UPDATE: I should note that despite with the issues I had with the Bridge Section of the text, the very simple design examples the author uses to explain how to run hand calculations for seismic analysis on a multi-span bridge using the Uniform Elastic Method and Single Mode Elastic Method couldn't have been better! The AASHTO code shows the formulas but they are utterly indiscernible to anyone that hasn't actually utilized them before. Once you truly understand these methods, you quickly realize that you can apply the theory to different span configurations and varying column heights and stiffnesses. I feel compelled to say that these example problems helped me TREMENDOUSLY when taking the afternoon portion of the lateral exam.

UPDATE: It's been 2 years since I passed my exam and I still use this book in actual practice. Hang on to this one. It has a real practical application.

I'm taking the Structural Depth portion of the PE, and find this book to be a much better reference than the CERM manual is for the morning session.

It is well organized and has all the information I would expect to need for the exam.