The author came to teaching later in life after a career as a consulting engineer. Recently, he has started to teach concrete design to Diploma students in Civil Engineering. The author starts with the idea that, at this level, concrete design should be shown to be a straight-forward extension of the material taught in earlier subjects such as 'Statics' and 'Strength of Materials'. The minutiae of AS3600 are for more advanced students at a higher level, perhaps at degree-level. Nevertheless, students should be able to address, for example, durability issues and reach conclusions that are correct and defensible.

The author draws on his own original contributions to rigid-plastic yield-line theories: (1) the 'bimoment method' for slabs considered as torsion-free 'Hillerborg' grillage continua and (2) the yield-line method for 'exact' solutions of plane-stress problems in structural concrete including ordinary beams in shear. These contributions have been published (1) since 1979 and (2) since 2008 although, in the second case, a good deal more is pending publication.