The Finite Element Method: Its Basis and Fundamentals

It's a good book, The delivery was fast.

This book is not as I expected, I bought this to implement FEM code for my MSc project and ended up without gaining any useful thing. Not recommended.

Zienkiewicz literally wrote the book on FEM. If you're serious, start here.

Upon browsing through the latest edition, it appears the book is slowly being streamlined towards the more general and clear presentation such as the weak function approach. I find the notation and presentation useless. There is rarely any useful information inherent in the notation, that is, manipulation of symbols becomes impossible. On the one hand they use the old standby of 'intuitive' elements that are connected through the nodes; 'forces' must be acting there etc, to then drop that for good right in the next chapter in favor of a mathematical global view.To understand this book you need to know continuum mechanics of course, and I'll venture to say I'll be better off with that and the Wikipedia entry on FE (which is excellent for once), than this (I'll provide an update).My general impression is, that while continuum mechanics is not easy - but can be presented very clearly - this book tries to make the subject of FE also appear correspondingly difficult, whereas the real FE concept is easy and should be presented that way.Probably only useful for practitioners that need to look up specific methods and are already familiar with most of the subject. You definitely won't learn anything that you don't know outside of FE here, there are never any proper derivations given.*UPDATE* right, so basically the existence of a Wikipedia entry going over the whole concept tells you there isn't that much to it. To get into the nitty-gritty, the best book is FEM by T.J.R. Hughes, first 3 chapters and you're golden.

So far as I've used the book: fine book that does give the basics and fundamentals. Disadvantage of this book is that not enough practical examples are given and solutions to (at least) a selection of the given problems is missing. This makes the book less appropriate for self study. So some guidance from a teacher is still needed.