Any practitioner who takes his profession in earnest, such that daily
work is not a heavy duty but part of their life, will recognize in this
book the rigorousness of the analysis and the comprehensive presentation
of the problems. This professional attitude is solely able to make the
research and design engineer deal with strength structures and their
behaviour. Indeed, the computational means that are nowadays available
permit the numerical computation of whatever problem; the pro- gram
libraries are extremely rich and programs themselves have developed
intensively. Howeyer, though computers are available at any moment
without restrictions on the frequency with which they are employed, they
finally impoYerish the creative compe- tency of the civil engineer.
Thus, he will calculate increasingly more while devising increasingly
less. He will draw less and less on the experience gained in devising
and implementing bearing structures because the computational process
can be repeated as often as desired over a minimum time-period by means
of the available programs. \Ve note that nowadays structures are no
longer investigated or economically designed to comply with the
requirements of the topic of interest.: Much to the contrary, the
solutions are chosen so as to comply with the capabilities of the
programs. A bearing structure lives as is prescribed by its initial con-
structive data.
