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Marks Handbook - 12th vs. 11th Edition

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Laserxenon

Laserxenon

Mechanical
Jun 2, 2003
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Hello,

I am going to be purchasing either of the two mentioned editions of Marks to have for taking the Mechanical PE exam and later for my library. On Amazon I found the following commentary about the 12th edition:

Though revised and added two new chapter [Applied Mechanics and Engineering Ethics], it is missing 8 chapters from 11th Edition namely: Chapter 1: Mathematical Tables and Measuring Units; Chapter 2: Mathematics; Chapter 10: Materials Handling; Chapter 12: Building Construction and Equipment; Chapter 13: Manufacturing Processes; Chapter 17: Industrial Engineering; and Chapter 20: Emerging Technologies. 11th Edition has 1939 pages but this new edition only contains 1536 pages.. 400 pages missing from the previous edition..marketed as student (based on B&N description)?

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments on this? This is either a ~$120 or $175 investment so I wanted to hear if anyone could elaborate.

Many thanks!
 
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Let's see. The top price is 17,500 cents. Compared to 2,000 hours of nominal employment per year, that means in under 9 years the book will be worth about 1 cent per hour; 8 cents per day. Looking at the price of lunch, it isn't too much unless you expect to set fire to the book at the end of the exam.
 
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According to the blurb, "The 100th Anniversary Edition of the Cornerstone Text of Mechanical Engineering—Fully Revised to Focus on the Core Subjects Critical to the Discipline" so presumably the 400 pages are not "critical" to the discipline.

Or you could get the 9th edition, which weighs in at 2048 pages.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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A handbook always changes somewhat from version to version. Something new is added, something that no longer seems necessary may get discarded. A handbook is a book that contains a lot of reference material, tables etc that usually do not change much over time, though more descriptive sections may get edited more. It is thus meant to be used for a large number of years, and most of the book you might never need.

Based on the descriptions you gave I would purchase the previous, larger, edition. It contains more sections that may contain useful information. "Applied mechanics" may well be a new name for part of the information previously described in the sections that got lost, "Engineering Ethics" may be new (and maybe important to you), but given its philosophical nature, does not lend it very well for a short description imho.
 
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Back when I was a student I faithfully bought a copy because "Every mechanical engineer must have a copy of Mark's".

Early in my career I did reference it on occasion.

I don't think I have opened it in the past 15 years.

 
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Laserxenon,

What do you need to know?

My 21[sup]st[/sup][ ]edition of the Machinery's Handbook has tables showing the area of any circle, given the diameter. This is in addition to the logarithm, trigonometry and root tables. This would have been handy back in the days of slide rules. All of this is gone from my 26[sup]th[/sup][ ]edition. Back in the day, if you needed accurate calculations, you used your log tables.

I have a copy of Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly, by Boothroyd, Dewhurst and Knight. If you to do design, I recommend this for your library, as it explains manufacturing processes.'

--
JHG
 
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I would assume most of the material that's been dropped was deemed to no longer be particularly useful. Most of the mathematical tables are completely unnecessary these days, who needs tables of areas of circles or logarithms when you have spreadsheets at your finger tips? The units info on the other hand is still useful but then you can google it in seconds too. I would probably buy the newest, it's a one time purchase, I'm still using the 8th edition.

----------------------------------------

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
 
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"Just feels right to have a physical book."

That would be nice, but physical books have physical dimensions. So far, my external harddrive has grown from about 60 MB to 2 TB, with barely a factor of 2 increase in total volume. The physical volume of the documents stored therein would be over 10,000 times larger. I could lose the PDFs of v6 through v12 in my shirt pocket, while few of us here would be capable of carrying those physical volumes more than a few steps.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRstuff,

Books use 0% of my computer screen real estate. How do you fix overused CDs and DVDs with shipping tape?

P1010259_snboik.jpg


--
JHG
 
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"How do you fix overused CDs and DVDs with shipping tape?"

Huh? What are those? ;-) I've not used either for data for long enough that it's always a challenge to find the drive when I come across something that actually requires reading a disk. But, I don't have to find shipping tape, ever. And, nothing dries out or turns gummy.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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I am assuming that you took your EIT. As you may have knowledge on the types of questions that you may tackle on the second part, Marks' HDBK should have those sections needed for reference.
 
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Actually I do have the text book, but I have to say that mines is in much better condition ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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Mine doesn't have any tape but the spine has a few cracks and I've got about a dozen sections marked with a stick on tab for quick reference. The problem with 2GB of PDF's is finding what you want quickly. The second problem with PDF's is getting the thumb drive to work again after it goes through the wash.

----------------------------------------

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
 
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dgallup,

Mine has been opened at least once a week, since college. I have printed off interesting articles and stuck them in there as bookmarks.

--
JHG
 
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