Book excerpt: The book incorporates all major topics in the civil engineering discipline and is written to serve as a refresher course with each topic presented briefly followed by an exhaustive set of objective type questions with keys for important questions at the end. It serves as a quick reference designed to help BE/B Tech undergraduate students and for practising engineers. Twenty chapters in the revised version extensively explore each key idea in civil engineering. In contrast, the questions in this book have been selected from a range of strong sources to help students learn how questions are formatted and what kinds of questions they might anticipate seeing on the test. This book is designed for students preparing for competitive exams like GATE, UPSC, IAS, IES, and SSC-JE as well as university exams. Overall the whole book has been updated, specially Chapters 3, 12, 13 & 14 on the basis of feedback received from the faculty as well as students. One new chapter “Estimation in Building Works” has been added in this new edition.