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If you don't already have a favorite book you go to for reference, this one will cover most of your bases during the exam. I should have walked in with just a calculator and this book.

It is also OK to jog your memory as you study the topics, but if you didn't understand the topic when you were in school, you won't understand it from this book either.

I like this book overall. It is very well organized, indexed, and contains just the right depth of information to act as a reference. The practice exam based on this book is way harder than the real thing. I would definitely recommend it as a reference. For studying, I think it has too much depth - you will end up spending way more time than needed and be over-prepared. You are better off taking a prep class at a local universityI bought this book near the end of my study for the PE exam - about a month before the test. However, it made looking up information so much easier than my other references, that I used it as my primary reference during the exam (along with Machinery's Handbook, and notes from a preparation class).

Lindeburg has done a great job at pulling together everything you'll see on the PE Mechanical exam. The format of the 12th edition is better than the 11th. The 11th included extra problems at the end of each chapter. Though this is helpful for studying, it clutters up the book and adds extra pages to thumb through during the exam. Edition 12 moved the problems at the end of the chapter to another book ("Practice Problems for the Mechanical Engineering PE Exam" - which I also recommend).

The book isn't perfect. You will find errata. Most of it is covered in the errata sheets on ppi2pass. Take an hour to look at the errata sheet and transfer the corrections to the book.

All in all, if you read each chapter and then work the associated practice problems, you should be able to pass the exam. The nice thing about this book is the fact that it is up to date with the exam. This is not true of some of the review classes you can take. I paid $1,750 for a class at Renssalaer in Hartford. I should have just taken the money and flushed it down the drain. The class was out-dated (the teacher kept giving examples of problems he remembered from when each question was 1 hour long). He also kept teaching us subjects and then saying "You probably won't see this on the exam". Talk about a waste of time. Also, the class claimed that the Lindeburg book was the official text. It wasn't. The official text was a 3 ring binder full of the teachers barely readable (they were copies of copies of copies of copies....) notes. Anyway, enough ranting about that. If you want to take a class, make sure you talk to someone who's taken it before, and make sure it teaches out of the Lindeburg book.

Also, as soon as you start studying, buy an approved calculator. It will be your best friend during the exam and you will need to be 100% familiar with it. Use it every day and get use to its functions. I have the Casio fx-115 ES. It served me well during the FE exam and the PE exam. Also, buy 2 of them. You must have an identical spare! You don't want your main calculator to die during the exam and then try to use a calculator you found laying in the bottom of your junk drawer. It will slow you down if you're not 100% familiar with it.

book in very good shape, it is an old edition, but so what, the concepts are the same.

This book had good points and bad points.

The Good:

Excellent review content
In combination with the practice problems, this is a very good preparation tool

The Bad:

- No practice problems in the text itself.
- PPI2Pass is no longer a friendly web sight and is entirely there to make money, be prepared to spend a lot if you want to use the site content
- Book Binding was TERRIBLE. my book was literally falling apart after 8 months of use. I have college textbooks that saw far heavier use and abuse over the course of 2 years that still have all of their pages. I am currently holding my pages in with scotch tape.
- There are equivalent products available from ASME that are better constructed and about the same price. Additionally, their video exam prep course is about $100 less than PPI's equivalent study course and is actually readily available

In hind sight, I would have opted for the ASME solution and never have gone with the PPI product.