This text is based on a one-semester course I have been teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology for about 30 years. Graduate students from mechanical and aerospace engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, and applied mathematics have been the main customers. Most of the students in my course have had some exposure to Newtonian fluids and linear elasticity. These two topics are covered here, neglecting the large number of boundary-value problems solved in undergraduate texts. On a number of topics, it becomes necessary to sacrifice depth in favor of breadth, as students specializing in a particular area will be able to delve deeper into that area with the foundation laid out in this course. Space and time constraints prevented the inclusion of classical topics such as hypoelasticity and electromagnetic effects in elastic and fluid materials and a more detailed treatment of nonlinear viscoelastic fluids.

I have included a small selection of exercises at the end of each chapter, and students who attempt some of these exercises will benefit the most from this text. Instructors may add reading assignments from other sources.

Instead of placing all the references at the end of the book, I have given the pertinent books and articles relevant to each chapter at the end of that chapter. There are some duplications in this mode of presentation, but I hope it is more convenient.