PPI Mechanical Engineering Practice Problems, 14th Edition – Comprehensive Pr...

Good Practice Problems

This book is full of ill-defined problems (ambiguous situations and questions) as well as typographical issues (missing symbols, words, sentences, etc.). It also includes subjects not on the PE exam such as the Three-Moment Equation. It has quantities with no units... Too many issues for such a high priced book. It says it's the fourteenth edition, but it's like it has never been edited let alone proof read.

As others have said this is a really expensive book for all the errors. Looking online for published corrections I found 120 pages worth of corrections in three different PDFs. It seems that these should make it into the book at some point, but it had been over a year since the last revision when I purchased it (all those 120 pages were published post-revision), and coming up on two years now. It also seems like it's using dated examples because it's giving all problems in SI and Imperial units, and as far as I was told that hasn't been done on the FE or PE exams in a very long time.

A few problems have wrong answers and or errors I thelroblems. I’ve found 2.

There are tons of errors in this book after reading first 10 chapters. Also there are many questions without the rest of information. For example at chapter 7 question number 6 suppose to have multiple answers, but there is nothing for it on the next page and in solution says the correct answer is B! It should be 3 separate books for this PE exam which they all mixed up here. People are not going to take all these exams and they would be only focused in one!

This book combines all three Mech exam questions into one book and there is no way to know which questions to study. I have already spent hours working on questions that are not needed for my exam. This was a waste of money and would not recommend it to anyone. Find another book!

This book has many, many errors and the errors are significant so that they hinder solving the problems and using this book to study. For example, in one problem the author forgot to divide by 144 to convert from lb/ft2 to psi, so that the available answers and the 'correct' answer were physically impossible. It appears they did not edit this book and check their work.

There are lots of mistakes in the solutions that make it harder to understand and learn. Refers you to illustrations that do not exist. Skips steps that are NOT trivial. Refers to information that is NOT in the handbook. On several occasions it will arrive at a different answer than the letter A, B, C, or D it says is correct. The book is huge because it contains the info for three different tests, so be sure to determine what is relevant to the PE exam you are taking. Finally, for being such a large book, there are only 5 - 10 practice problems per chapter, which doesn't feel like enough on some of the more challenging topics.