Civil Engineering Association

1.1 WHY THIS BOOK
It is said that authorship of any kind is a tremendous boost to one’s ego. Readers, who would care to go through these pages, can be rest assured that this book has not been written to gratify one’s ego trip.
Reason for its birth has been our deep-rooted concern on the way profession of engineering and especially civil engineering is going – in terms of teaching and practice.
Civil Engineering is perhaps the oldest profession amongst the realms of technology, which has been practiced by human being from the early dawn of civilization. It is also indeed a fact that umpteen numbers of books have been written addressing various topics on Civil and Structural engineering from the time of Galileo (1594) till date. So what made us write this book when many of the things mentioned herein may or may not be available in other literature?
The reason for its birth can be attributed as follows:Civil engineering community in India, in spite of making a lot of progress, very few
authors have addressed the topics that we have tried to cover under one platform.
Topics related to structural and soil dynamics that are taught in the universities or referred to in design offices are still dependent on very limited number of books1, or code of practices (often outdated) or research papers not readily available to an average student/engineer.
Finally, in last two decades we have seen a very peculiar trend and that which has affected the profession globally, and could have a long lasting influence on it.
If we look around the world in terms of books published in civil engineering in the last two decades (1980–2000) it will be observed that unlike the period 1960–70 almost all books have been authored by academicians where practicing engineers rarely contributed! Whatever could be the reason for this apathy from engineers in the industry the point remains that students coming out of engineering institutes, unlike 30 years ago
are being exposed minimally to practice as prevalent in industry.
And this we believe is creating a serious gap in engineering education. Till such times practicing engineers are encouraged like in developed countries to participate in teaching we are fearful that engineering especially civil engineering will metamorphose into more an advance course in mathematical physics rather than a scientific art where theory is honed by intuitive practices and field realties.
Engineering is not only a maze of differential equations, tensors, matrix algebra, or developing software program. It is much beyond these, where all these mathematical techniques are mere tools in the hands of a capable engineer who can intuitively visualize the behavior of the structure and foundation he is going to design and check his
intuitive deduction based on the above tools in hands and this makes it essential to synthesize theory and practice that becomes the hallmark of a complete engineer