To our sons, Mike, Andrew, Alex, who did not inherit their fathers'
level of interest in applied mechanics, but who became sophisticated in
software development and in this regard surpassed their parents. A.P.,
V.S. Hard times came, the god5 got angry. Children do not behave
themselves and everybody wishes to write a book. Ancient Babylonian
inscription X Preface Preface to the English Edition The book you are
reading is a translation from Russian into English. Within a pretty
short term this book saw two editions in Russian. The authors received
in- spiring responses from readers that both stimulated our continuing
and improving this work and made sure it would not be in vain of us to
try to multiply our readers by covering the English-speaking engineering
community. When we prepared the present edition, we took into account
interests of the Western readers, so we had to make some changes to our
text published earlier. These changes include the following aspects.
First, we excluded a lot of references and discussions regarding Russian
engi- neering codes. It seems to us those are of no real interest for
Western engineers oriented at Eurocode or national construction design
regulations.