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New Salmon and Johnson Book

New Salmon and Johnson Book

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I'll believe it when September 18 rolls around and someone actually gets it.  It was originally supposed to be available in April of 2007 (yes, that is correct, April of '07), but the date kept moving back (probably about 7 or 8 times).  I had it pre-ordered through Amazon over a year ago and got sick of waiting so I canceled my order.  I'll wait until it is actually out to order it.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Is this book worth getting if you follow CSA S16 or is the information general and not code specific?

Thanks

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Clansman - the older S&J book I have does include some good information - but when the examples showed up they generally followed the AISC specifications.  It would still be a useful book for anyone - but if there is a good quality CSA-specific book out there it would be better to go with that I'm sure.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Exactly JAE,
CSA S16 differs from AISC, however the fundamentals are the same. Salmon Johnson 3rd ed. I use as a basic reference, so yes that dates me.
Clansman;
Steel design 'Guide to Stability Design Criteria for Metal Structures' is a must, T.V. Galambos is the 'god' of steel design but haven't got around to purchasing latest edition and still have the 4th edition handy.
S-16 (Canadian) contains many useful references, which are what your looking for anyways, ie the references.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

connect2,
3rd edition doesn't date you too much.  Mine is 2nd Edition and it was hot off the presses in my Grad School Advanced Structures Class.  It's still a good reference.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Ha, click on the site again, it's moved back to October 11.  If we're lucky it might actually be out by the time the NEXT steel spec is released!

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Connect2,
Curious to know how CSA S16 differs from AISC. I don't know AISC. I was told they are similar to some extant.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Can't think of a better way to fish for Salmon than with a Johnson outboard...

Couldn't pass that one up either...

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Now it's moved to Oct. 20.  They'll have to release it EVENTUALLY, right?!

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

(OP)
I'm hoping so, at least the date only seems to have moved a week this time... as opposed to a month

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

(OP)
looks like it is coming out on monday, although the price is now 50$ more....

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

We'll see.  I pre-ordered it a while back, so I'm paying $122.  Up until today, it had it shown online as expecting to ship yesterday.  Now it says it will ship next Friday.  This book better completely blow my mind!

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I heard Salmon & Johnson referenced a lot as the preeminent steel book.  What is so great about it??

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

It looks like it might actually be finished.  Amazon is showing it as "in-stock" and I am scheduled to get my copy on Monday.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

(OP)
Thought it was released on Monday.... was wondering why amazon hadn't sent me a message....

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I have the e-book and it looks A LOT like my circa 1990 edition, except with updated Spec. Eq. references.  Seems to me to be a tiny update.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

271828 - that is what I heard from some of the reviewers - a face-lift of equation references.  I haven't seen it myself though so I am not speaking from experience.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Are you kidding?!?!  I've been waiting for this book for a long time - thinking it would give such a great explanation for the DAM.  
I got an email this morning that my copy shipped and should be here Monday.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Heh - give us a review when you get it, maybe I'm wrong.  As far as the DM method goes, the Stability design guide (whenever it comes out) should handle that quite nicely.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Yes, I've been checking AISC for that for some time.  I should send a question to find out when it is coming.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I heard recently that AISC hasn't gotten the Stability DG from the authors yet, so it'll be a while still.

The DAM coverage in S&J is anemic at best, unless it's covered somewhere besides Page 623-625 which is the only DAM entry in the Index.  

On a positive note, the stability bracing coverage is non-trivial.

I'm teaching an advanced steel class in the spring and am going to use this book.  I am somewhat disappointed in it, but it does show where a lot of things come from.  Any thoughts on a better advanced textbook?  

I actually got a very bad feelng about the text when I saw that they still include a lot of info about old-timey plastic design of frames--as if anybody does that nowadays.  They needed to drop that and beef up some of the other areas.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

How do you check the old timey buildings if you are not teaching old timey methods of design?

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

LOL, good one civilperson.  I think one could check 99% of older rigid frames using newer methods and be ok.  All I'm saying is that the whole chapter could've been used better on "more current" topics.  What are there, like 2 people using plastic analysis these days?!  There are thousands trying to figure out the DAM.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I think plastic analysis is a fundamental of structural behaviour that the student should understand whether it is commonly practiced or not.

  

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

haynewp, I agree with that conceptually also.  Here's a question, though, for you and civilperson.  

Say a university has two courses on steel design.  What does a professor displace to make room for plastic design?  We had plastic design in school and it took about 3 weeks.

Steel properties, tension members, columns, beams, beam-columns, connections, composite beams, frames (DAM and ELM, etc.), plate girders, thin-walled sections (Section E7 stuff)?

Given 3 classes, PD makes the cut IMO.  Not many universities have that, though.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

A little clarification:

I know the point of the thread isn't university course design, but it was implied (at least I read into it) that PD should be covered in school.  Otherwise, how would _students_ understand it?

My other point is just that it's silly to blow off big current topics and then have a sizeable chapter on a topic nobody uses.  It emphasizes that the book is a rehash of old stuff.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Torsion, seismic weak beams and plastic design are all in short supply by graduates with two steel courses.  

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Personally I think that Structural Engineering graduates are held back by being required to take Civil-specific courses in their undergrad...

I do not need to know how to size sewage pipes to know that I need to accomodate them.  Even worse are required courses such as traffic, contaminated lands, etc.

Stripping the fluff would give room for the "meaty" content being removed.  We need to accept that the average engineer is no longer a generalist; Computers have ensure that.  The modern reality requires a modern approach to engineering training...

And for the record, plastic design is still in common use by many engineers...  I require the two new grads I am training to check their computer output with a rigorous hand-method.  If the sizes don't match, it has not yet been due to hand method error.  Thus far each deviation has been due to a contraint, release, section size, node misallignment, etc, etc, etc.  Readily used hand analysis methods (or FEM, CAE, etc, in Mathcad or Excel) are essential to a quality self-check of QA review of a job.  That is why Salmon and Johnson should NEVER remove this section, even if a course adopting does not use it.  Many of my best references are texts which were "over and above" for a course which assigned them.

Regards,

YS

B.Eng (Carleton)
Working in New Zealand, thinking of my snow covered home...

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Ive heard alot of this Salmon and Johnson book from these threads.  Now Im am practising in Australia and I think our favorite (at least mine anyway) is Gorenc and Tinyou.  Im just wondering if any Aussie Enginners use Salmon and Johnson in their structural design.  Any comments would be appreciated.
 

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

"Personally I think that Structural Engineering graduates are held back by being required to take Civil-specific courses in their undergrad...

I do not need to know how to size sewage pipes to know that I need to accomodate them.  Even worse are required courses such as traffic, contaminated lands, etc."

I totally agree with that!  I was thinking a couple of years ago that I would've been A LOT better off if I would've been an Engineering Mechanics undergrad and then a structural engineering grad student.  One of my plans at my current job is to try and develop a structural engineering specialty that lets the undergrads out of some of those fluff (for us) classes and take more mechanics and design classes.

You guys have inspired me to add at least an intro to PD to my spring course.  I'll try to remember to report back as to how it works.  I might just stop at beams, though, because I remember all that instantaneous center and crazy geometry taking a lot of time.  I still have to have room for torsion and a slew of other topics.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

civeng80,

I have a copy of S & J 2nd Edition from 1980 which I still refer to from time to time, mostly for detailing issues and ideas.  It is a good reference, but as the Australian steel standards evolved from the British rather than the American, there are a lot of different ways of doing things and a lot of differing provisions.  And I imagine the new version is still not metric.

Interesting that the Aussie concrete code is much more closely aligned with the ACI code.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Thanks Hokie66

I have a copy of Brezler Lin and Scalzi which I use occasionally for ideas, its not bad (maybe a bit outdated now) so I think I know where your coming from.  S & J seems a pretty expensive book too, you think the cost would outweigh the benefits for building structures at least?
 

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I did receive my copy this morning.  I must admit, I am extremely disappointed in the whole 3 pages devoted to the DAM.  I'll let you know more about the rest as I have time to look it over.

youngstructural-
Does your firm have the time to allow young engineers to check things by hand?  I would love to take the time to do some critical beam deflections with castigliano's method or maybe a combined footing using a beam on elastic foundation, but I would never have the time to sit and do it by hand.  I try to do as much as I can by hand, but I know I would never have the time to do the really involved stuff.  Kudos to your company for allowing you to do that!  Truth be told, however, I might be a little intimidated having to check a computer output for a building's lateral force distribution when the LFRS is 20 moment frames (distribution issues) of varying member sizes (stiffness issues) with all of the ridiculous load combinations.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

"Truth be told, however, I might be a little intimidated having to check a computer output for a building's lateral force distribution when the LFRS is 20 moment frames (distribution issues) of varying member sizes (stiffness issues) with all of the ridiculous load combinations."

StrlEIT, from this, it sounds like you're looking to check the wrong kinds of things.  Those wouldn't be realistic anywhere.

As a counter-example, you can make sure your frame analysis program is coming up with reasonable 2nd-order amplifications by approximately calculating B2, right?  That's a matter of minutes for a story.

As another example, you can check phiMn coming out of a program by peeking at the AISC beam response curves (Table 3-10?--don't have my Manual here).  

You can also use the simple equations in AISC DG11 Ch 3 to estimate your building's period for comparison w/ program output -- takes just a few minutes and this has been very close every time I've done it.

Just sneak these kinds of checks in on scrap paper and toss them.  Nobody will even notice.  I don't think many folks crank out pages of formal manual calcs on a daily basis to check programs.

Also, as for PD helping to check computer output: How do you guys do that?  PD only gives the ultimate collapse load.  Unless you're doing a material and geometric nonlinear frame analysis, your program isn't going to find the collapse load.  Someone please enlighten me.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Fair enough.  I often do back of the envelope type stuff to check moment capacities and if the program is applying the loads properly and many critical deflection locations.  
Youngstructural's post said "rigorous hand method..."  I assumed it was much more involved than what we just talked about.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Good Morning All;

StructuralEIT:  You asked if the firm has the time to permit checking etc.  Well, no, unfortunately, not really.  HOWEVER, that said, I have found that with fresh grads, making them go through a full hand-check catches the errors that they inevitably make prior to the Drafties getting the wrong stuff drawn, my check finding the error, and embarrassing the intern and stressing the whole team with a rushed re-work.

I would argue that until an engineer has a minimum of three years experience, as well as feels truly comfortable with a given type of design (which in combination may take many, many years), hand checks are indispensable.  Just to give you an idea, I am now at five years experience and have worked on some fairly major projects (hospitals, firehalls, schools, historic structures, 65000 seat stadium), but ALL of my work is back-checked and re-checked.

I have yet to have an error caught by an external reviewer or council (knocks on wood), but have caught plenty of my own errors, and had errors caught by our in-house staff.  I approach reviewing my own work and that of my colleagues with a simple, yet not rigid, approach:  If you haven't found any errors, you haven't reviewed long enough.

As for my "rigorous hand methods" statement, I did mean it.  I am talking about relative rigidity checks for the proportion of seismic load walls take, simple span moment envelopes up-shifted with regard to proportionate end-fixity to check computer outputs, etc, etc.

Regards,

YS

B.Eng (Carleton)
Working in New Zealand, thinking of my snow covered home...

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

civeng80,

I wouldn't buy S&J if you only intend working in Australia or to Australian Standards.  But if you ever have to work to US AISC standards, then it is probably essential.  My 1980 version has 27.50 in pencil inside the front cover, and that was a lot then, so it has never been cheap.  1007 pages, though.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

The crap university I went to has only one steel and one concrete course. No masonry or timber at all, although some of the basic topics related to these materials were covered in a structural analysis course.  I always resented having to take nonstructural courses, but thats almost all that was ever offered.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Whilst I agree that subjects like Physics are fundamental for stuctural engineers, subjects such as applied Thermodynamics, dynamics of machines, electronic engineering which I had to do as part of my civil engineering course were just a waste of time.  It would have been much more productive to at least do more business related subjects which I did later on at a postgraduate level.

I think now civil/ structural engineering is more the way I would have liked it to be.  Fluid mechanics was also a subject that gave me a hard time, while structures was more to my liking and I would have been happy to do more both in theory and practice.

 

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

civeng80, I think one answer is to have a structural engineering specialty within a civil engineering curriculum, and I'm sure some places have this.  If a guy wants to be a structural engineer, let him out of that second hydraulics class and some of the other civil engineering courses that will be of absolutely no use at any point in his life.  Somebody at some point will need a class he didn't take, but that's always the case no matter how the curriculum is structured.  For example, I ended up needing to know about circuits, but had never had a class.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

What you guys are talking about is available, but it is an ET degree per ABET, not an engineering degree.  While it does prepare you better than a CE undergrad degree it does limit you with respect to licensing.  I have a BSET in structural design.  I didn't have to take stormwater management or traffic engineering - I did get to take (2) steel courses, (2) concrete courses, (2) analysis courses - including energy methods and matrix analysis, (1) foundations course, (1) class on wind/seismic code provisions, and a very in-depth senior project.  This was all undergrad an in addition to the traditional statics/dynamics/strength of materials, CE materials, fluid mechanics, etc...  I did also take calc-based physics I & II.
The biggest difference between the engineering degree and the ET degree is the number of disciplines that you have to demonstrate competence in.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

(OP)
I didn't have to take stormwater or traffic either, but instead of getting a CE degree I have a general engineering degree with a specialty in civil engineering. I also pulled down (2) steels, (2) concretes, (3) analysis, (1) foundations, (1) timber and masonry(which really wasn't a very effective course), and (1) advanced mechanics. But I also walked out with 20 CH beyond what was required for graduation, I'm paying dearly for it now too, seeing as I took all those courses as an undergrad there isn't a whole lot left for me to take as a grad student.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I do not see why we have to take; chemistry, political science, history, programming etc., come on we are getting an education not going to a tech. school.  I also took as many classes as you did in structural design plus survey, transportation, water.  It is all about where you go and what you do with it.  I would not want to go to a program that did not include these courses.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Unless you take MORE than is required for graduation, you will likely get no more than 3 to 4 structural classes in a typical undergrad CE program.  I'm not saying the classes aren't offered at the school, but with the requirement to demonstrate competency in (4) disciplines, the undergrad CE degree doesn't give you much of an opportunity to specialize in any one area.

Sandman - just out of curiosity, how many credits did you need to graduate?

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

198, I think I finished with a few more than that but only because I transferred into my college.

I had (2+lab) structural analysis, (2+lab) geotech., (1) steel, (1+lab) timber lab was a building design project, (1+lab) concrete, req'd, electives I took (1) seismic, computer methods in structural analysis.  In addition, a year long design project, which for the one I did was a year and a half.  I could have taken more classes but to get out I had to take others but they also had, masonry design, foundation and retaining wall design, and a couple that I cannot remember right now.

 

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

198!  That's about what it takes to get a PhD, right?

I don't think exclusion of irrelevant coursework equals producing technicians versus engineers.  It's what happens in the courses.  For example, does the student learn to pick a beam from a table or does he know that assumptions went into making the table?  Does he know how to turn on the "P-Delta" feature in a program or does he really know what P-Delta (and P-delta) effects are all about?

I've thought for a while that SEs are much closer cousins to MEs than the rest of CEs.  By choosing to take surveying, traffic, construction management, hydraulics, etc. one has chosen to NOT take advanced mech. of materials, vibrations, FEA (at least in undergrad), stability, mech. of thin-walled structures, etc.  All of those classes are a lot more useful for a SE and most are undergrad classes for MEs, aerospace, etc.  I'd hope that in the future, it will be typical for SE to be a different degree from CE.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

198 is extremely high.  Most CE undergrad programs only require in the neighborhood of 132-140.  I needed 138, and I think if you poll most people, their undergrad CE degree didn't allow them to take more than (probably) 4 structural courses.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Could sandman be talking about quarter hours rather than semester hours?  I would have had about that many quarter hours, but admittedly in the dark ages.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Hokie-

That's quite possible.  Now that you mention it, there is a pretty reputable engineering school in Philadelphia that does that.  I remember looking at their program and seeing that they require almost 200 credits.  I was floored when I realized that it was the same number of classes, but they do trimesters instead of semesters.  They also offered less than most for structural courses at the undergrad level.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

I think a lot of this depends on how many technical electives the department allows.  At my old school, I was able to load up a bunch of tech elective with structural classes.  I only had 136 semester hours and had two steel classes, reinf concrete, prestressed concrete, wood, foundations, matrix structural analysis, and stability during undergrad.  I could've taken another concrete and another wood class, but didn't like the teachers -- took another math class and mech. behavior of materials instead.  

My co-workers over the years were amazed at how many structural classes I was able to take.  They had just a couple because they were forced to take so many classes that broadened their educations.

For structural anyway, I think this is a big mistake.

RE: New Salmon and Johnson Book

Yes those are quarter hours so roughly 138 semesters' hours.  I only had two electives in the structural area.  They do have programs out here(CA) that are structural engineering degrees; I could have gone to these programs but decided against going, I don't regret it, I also don't think it has hurt me or will hurt me in my career.  It also makes passing the P.E. easier. lol

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