Textbook in PDF format This is a book for people who love finite elements and MatLAB. We will use the popular computer package MatLAB as a matrix calculator for doing finite element analysis. Problems will be solved mainly using MatLAB to carry out the tedious and lengthy matrix calculations in addition to some manual manipulationsespecially when applying the boundary conditions. In particular the steps of the finite element method are emphasized in this book. Problems from linear elastic structural mechanics are used throughout the book. The emphasis is not on mass computation or programming, but rather on learning the finite element method computations and understanding of the underlying concepts. Also each chapter starts with a summary of the basic equations for the element followed by a number of examples demonstrating the use of the element using the provided MatLAB functions