Using Fox McDonald 7th Edition Without Losing Your Mind
The book sits on every university shelf next to the thermodynamics text, and for good reason. It is one of the few fluid mechanics books that actually teaches you how to set up a control volume before it asks you to solve it. I have used it in three different classes now, and I keep coming back to it because the worked examples are not stripped down to the point where they teach nothing. The full title matters here because people buy the wrong edition. The 7th edition was published around 2010 and it includes the SI and British Gravitational unit systems side by side, which is rare. Some later editions dropped the BG chapter, so if you need both systems this is the one to get. The structure is linear but generous. It starts with fluid properties, moves through hydrostatics, then the integral forms of the conservation laws, and builds from there into viscous flow, dimensional analysis, pipe networks, external flow, open channel flow, and finally turbomachinery. That last chapter is where most people drop off because it assumes you are already comfortable with velocity triangles, and the book does not always spell that out for you.
The main pedagogical move is the problem-solving methodology box at the start of nearly every chapter. It gives you a template: draw the control surface, list what you know, list what you need, pick your governing equations, solve, check. Beginners skip that box. They should not skip it. I watch students skip it, plug numbers into a formula, and get the wrong answer because the control volume was defined backwards. One time in my second semester I solved a pipe junction problem where the mass flow direction was ambiguous, and I kept getting a negative velocity. I went back and redrew the control surface with the outlets explicitly labeled as exits rather than assuming direction, and the sign flipped. The book teaches you to do that by default. Most students treat it like decoration. There is a quirk in the 7th edition that catches people. The momentum equation chapters use gauge pressure consistently for most examples but occasionally switch to absolute pressure without much warning, especially in the cavitation sections. I ran into this when solving a problem in Chapter 5 where a nozzle discharges into a region with known absolute pressure. I used gauge throughout and got a slightly wrong result. I had to reread the problem statement and notice the atmospheric reference was given as an absolute value of 101.3 kPa, not as zero gauge. The fix was straightforward: convert everything to gauge first, solve, then convert back at the end. I mark those pages now before I even start solving. One counter-intuitive thing about this book that nobody tells you: the Bernoulli equation is not the primary tool here. It appears early, yes, but the real backbone is the Reynolds Transport Theorem and the integral conservation equations. Bernoulli is a special case of the energy equation under very tight assumptions, and the book makes that clear if you read the derivations instead of just memorizing the final formula. Beginners who learn Bernoulli cold and try to apply it everywhere end up with answers that are off by twenty percent in problems involving friction or significant elevation changes. The energy equation with the head loss term handles those cases, and the book walks through it in Chapter 6.
Another thing worth knowing before you start: the appendix with property tables is useful but incomplete. The steam tables are truncated, and if you are working with water near the critical point you will need a separate source. I use the NIST Webbook for anything above 300°C or below freezing, and I keep the book tables for everything else. The friction factor charts in the back are fine for rough estimates, but I switched to the Haaland equation for pipe flow calculations years ago. It gives you the same accuracy as reading the Moody chart by hand, and it takes about eight seconds to compute on a calculator instead of two minutes of squinting at logarithmic scales. The problem sets are where the book earns its reputation. They range from plug-and-chug to genuinely hard. Chapter 9 on dimensional analysis is thin compared to the rest of the book. You will need a supplemental resource if you want to understand the pi theorem deeply. I supplemented it with a couple of lecture notes from an online course, and that filled the gaps enough to get through the chapter. Open channel flow in Chapters 13 and 14 is another area where the book is strong but not perfect. The specific energy diagrams are clear, but the gradually varied flow chapter assumes you already know how to integrate the dynamic equation numerically. I used a simple Euler method in a spreadsheet and it worked fine for homework. For real design work you would use HEC-RAS or similar software, but the book does not go there, and that is fine because it is a textbook, not a design manual.
Get the Full Details
If you are buying this book, check whether you need the WileyPLUS companion. It exists, but I found it mostly redundant. The solution manual that ships with the instructor copy is more useful than the online homework system, and students who do not have access to it can still get through the book by working the examples first, covering the solution, and then checking their work. That is how I learned it. The one honest downside: the 7th edition is old enough that some of the example numbers feel dated, and the typesetting is a bit cramped in the later chapters. The figures in the turbomachinery section are especially small. I print those pages at 150% scale or work from a PDF with zoom, because reading blurry velocity triangles is miserable and wastes time you could spend solving problems. Overall the book does what it claims to do. It teaches you to think in control volumes, to write down the right equations before reaching for a shortcut, and to check whether your answer makes physical sense. That is harder to find in most undergraduate texts.
