An Introduction to the Finite Element Method, 3rd Edition (McGraw Hill Series in Mechanical Engineering)

I taught myself FEM for a project that needed it from this book. The book was well structured and clearly written such that I needed no other outside resources to figure out what to do. (The project was a mechanical simulation for part of a physics experiment I was working on.) Would recommend without hesitation to the self-studier.

Dr. JN Reddy's "An Introduction to the FEM" serves as a stand-alone and all-inclusive reference text. After reading the first two chapters, I felt perfectly comfortable with the logical sequence by which ideas and methodology of FEM are presented. The author has delivered the analysis of 1D problems in an easy-to-follow manner i.e. from bar, truss, beam and frames before proceeding to the time-dependent problems. His FEM1D program proves to be an effective, academically driven tool to apply the fundamentals of finite element analysis to computer.

I learnt FE from this book. It is clear, coincise, full of well-worked examples. It covers almost all of the aspectes of FE programming. The book contains two educational codes, thought both are FORTRAN77 code, one can easily understand what's going on, so as to rewrite it in C or, say, FORTRAN90.The first s chapters of the book regard the FEm method in general, the 4th focuses on structural mechanics, 5th is about errors in FE analysis, 6th and 7th about numerical integration and 8th is on 2 and 3 dimension FE problem.Actually this is an introductory book, so the 2 and 3 D problems are not deeply trated.The book is never hard to understand, and it's suitable (waw!!) for self study.

From an undergraduate student perspective, this book is a great introductory text. It gives full details and easy to follow step-by-step methods for the example problems. Thank you, thank you, thank you for making this book understandable! I hope other authors of books for undergraduate students will apply a similar format.

J.N. Reddy's has to be one of the finest books for learning the finite element method. The presentation is simple and follows a careful order that essential for understanding the implementation of the technique. The book has many examples from structural engineering, but even if you are not interested in structures (as I am), there are many cross-disiplinary examples. The book also has some Fortran examples in the appendix. This book is far easier to understand than "The finite element method for engineers" by Juebner, Thornton and Byrom.