In a global climate where engineers are increasingly under pressure to make the most of limited resources, there are huge potential financial and environmental benefits to be gained by designing for minimum weight. With Mechanics of Optimal Structural Design, David Rees brings the original approach of weight optimization to the existing structural design literature, providing a methodology for attaining minimum weight of a range of structures under their working loads. He addresses the current gap in education between formal structural design teaching at undergraduate level and the practical application of this knowledge in industry, describing the analytical techniques that students need to understand before applying computational techniques that can be easy to misuse without this grounding.