In the first edition of this book, I attempted to present a concise and unified introduction to elastic plate theory. Wherever possible, the approach was to give a clear physical picture of plate behaviour. The presentation was thus geared more towards engineers than towards mathematicians, particularly to structural engineers in aeronautical, civil and mechanical engineering and to structural research workers. These comments apply equally to this second edition. The main difference here is that I have included thermal stress effects, the behaviour of multi-layered composite plates and much additional material on plates in the largedeflexion régime. The objective throughout is to derive ‘continuum’ or analytical solutions rather than solutions based on numerical techniques such as finite elements which give little direct information on the significance of the structural design parameters; indeed, such solutions can become simply number-crunching exercises that mask the true physical behaviour.