It has been more than a decade since the second edition of Advanced Engineering Dynamics was published. Although I was pleased with that effort, my experience teaching dynamics with that book as a companion has given me insights that I either did not have or did not fully appreciate. I tried to satisfy multiple objectives as I wrote the present book. I wished to convey both physical and analytical understanding of the fundamental principles, and to expose the beauty of the discipline as a tightly woven sequence of concepts. I wanted to address the complexities of real-world engineering problems and explore the implications of dynamics for other subjects, but to do so in a manner that is accessible to those who come to it from a wide range of experiences. I wanted to provide a self-contained resource from which the motivated reader could learn directly. At first, I thought this book would just be a third edition of Advanced Engineering Dynamics, but as I progressed, I realized that the expanded scope and the amount of material that is either new or redone necessitated treating it as a new work.

The subject of dynamics is an interdisciplinary blend of physics, applied mathematics, computational methods, and basic logic. The least difficult aspect of the subject is the basic physical laws, most of which are at least a century old. A primary element that has moved the study of dynamics from natural philosophy to engineering is the development of powerful tools for describing motion and for solving equations of motion.