THIS book is written for my students. As an academician who returned to

education after 15 years working in industry and business, I can understand

the hardship and difficulties for master and PhD students, as well as

young researchers wanting to adopt the knowledge outside their area.

While my formal education was in mechanics from bachelor until doctorate degree,

I was lucky enough to work as an R&D manager/technician at the same time,

responsible for the metallurgical department in an automotive supplier in its Detroit

headquarters. I was also lucky enough to have worked for a laboratory that supports

the metallurgical division of an oil company back in my early career. As a result, I

can easily integrate the mechanics concept into materials science area. Among the

students that I supervised, I noticed that students with pure materials background are

commonly have great difficulties getting their works published, while the ones with

mechanics background were able to publish their works with hardly any difficulties.

Usually, it doesn’t take long for me to teach basic mechanics again, they can integrate

the concept of mechanics into their research after that. By doing so, they can publish

their work easier in high impact journals. This book was prepared for them to get a

jump start to be familiar with a mechanics concept.