This book is written by an engineer for engineering students (and practising engineers). While the presentation of the core material is fairly traditional, an attempt has been made to emphasize the impact of the formidable computational capability now available to all engineers. The author tends to favour simplicity and "abundance"; that is, many simple elements. Some mathematics is necessary for understanding the finite element method, but hopefully the approach and terminology of this book is familiar to the "engineering" way of thinking, and for the most part derivations are based on the principle of virtual displacements. As the owner of this book you are entitled to download two simple, but useful and easy-to-use FEM programs (for Windows) to your own PC from http://www.fagbokforlaget.no/fem Both programs (FEMplate and CrossX) are used in connection with several examples in the book.