The distinctive features of this book, as seen from the title, lie in the systematic and intensive use of Hamilton's variational principle and its generalizations for deriving the governing equations of conservative and dissipative mechanical systems, and also in providing the direct variational-asymptotic analysis, whenever available, of the energy and dissipation for the solution of these equations. It will be demonstrated that many well-known methods in dynamics like those of Lindstedt-Poincare, Bogoliubov-Mitropolsky, Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM), and Whitham are derivable from this variational-asymptotic analysis.