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More Field Guide than Textbook

04 Apr 2026 - Michael H. Scott

I launched this Substack with the intention of serializing a textbook on structural analysis. To be honest, the idea was not fully fermented and may never come to fruition.

But what became clear as this Substack drifted along while I continued writing blog posts elsewhere about snippets of OpenSees is that the textbook idea wasn’t going to take root any time soon.

Image generated with AI.

Structural analysis, especially for nonlinear response, doesn’t organize itself very well as a textbook, at least not for me. Nonlinear analysis feels more like a field guide than a textbook.

A textbook strives for completeness and rigor, usually within well-defined problems. But a field guide acknowledges that analyses can get messy, especially for edge cases, and that nonlinear analysis will always feel incomplete.

I can’t list all the edge cases—you know them when you see them. Some cases are software quirks while others are a mismatch between analysis approach and modeling expectation.

Solving those cases takes knowledge of the analysis methods and software you’re using. And if you don’t write down the solutions, those same edge cases will come back again and again.