Geotechnical engineering: Unsaturated and Saturated Soils

by Jean-Louis Briaud

Written by a leader on the subject, Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering is first introductory the textbook to cover both saturated and unsaturated soil mechanics.

Destined to become the next leading text in the field, this book presents a new approach to teaching the subject, based on fundamentals of unsaturated soils, and extending the description of applications of soil mechanics to a wide variety of topics.

This groundbreaking work features a number of topics typically left out of undergraduate geotechnical courses.

“Things should be made as simple as possible but not a bit simpler than that.”
Albert Einstein (Safir and Safire 1982)

Finding the Einstein threshold of optimum simplicity was a constant goal for the author when writing the book.

The first driving force for writing it was the coming of age of unsaturated soil mechanics: There was a need to introduce geotechnical engineering as dealing with true three-phase soils while treating saturated soil as a special case, rather than the other way around.

The second driving force was to cover as many geotechnical engineering topics as reasonably possible in an introductory book, to show the vast domain covered by geotechnical engineering and its important contributions to society.