This book is the text for the introductory course on Soil Mechanics at Delft University of Technology’s Department of Civil Engineering, as I gave from 1980 until my retirement in 2002. It includes an introduction to the major principles and methods of soil mechanics, such as the analysis of stresses, deformations and stability. It also describes the most important methods of determining soil parameters, both in the laboratory and in situ, and in the appendices presents the basic principles of applied mechanics that are frequently used. The text has been developed on the basis of lectures at Delft by Profs. Nanninga, Langejan and De Josselin de Jong. The subdivision into chapters is such that one chapter can be treated in a single lecture, with sufficient time for demonstrations of soil behavior and some illustrative applications, including failures of soil structures.