NEW BOOK
Circuit Analysis Fundamentals, by Mansour Eslami, Chicago IL: Agile Press, xxiv + 400 pp., 2005, ISBN 0-9718239-5-2, Library of the Congress Control Number 2005902650. (Website: agilepress@agileresearch.com)
Brief Description of the Book: As every electrical engineering educator knows, there are some mystic elements associated with basic circuit theory, which fascinate many students and scare some. With absolute certainty, learning circuit analysis is a very challenging task for most entry-level engineering students and they should get all the help possible. This is a course where mathematics and physics meet quite eloquently to give birth to an engineering discipline. Furthermore, there is a great chance to show young minds, including those non-electrical engineering students who are required to take one circuit course, how knowledge is built and expanded. How can we make this course a memorable one even for those who are not pursuing electrical engineering? How does one tap in to these opportunities? The answer to these and similar questions depends on the selection of a textbook with a sense of purpose. Particularly when the new book comes with both instructor’s teaching as well as solution manuals fully in PDF, resulting in no extra work preparing lectures for those instructors who will adopt this book. Indeed, the teaching manual displays all lecture materials in large illustrations for possible screen demonstration, and facilitates teaching from this textbook tremendously, and thus instructors will be free to teach without any extra effort for lecture preparations.
Nowadays, most classical circuit textbooks in the market are written in a rather encyclopedic manner with close to 1000 pages, and covering many non-essential topics with too much repetition. Only a small portion of these books is actually taught in classrooms, while it is very expensive to produce each book. In contrast, this rigorous new book of 400 pages focuses coherently on the fundamentals of circuit theory, such that students benefit the most and remember the underlying topics longer. The primary contribution of this new textbook has been to cut through a body of materials, which these materials are not simple for the first timer, but are presented in an orderly and an algorithmically oriented approach, in order that students will grasp the materials covered in the course even though their backgrounds in mathematics and physics may possibly be weak. It has not been the author's intention to write a textbook that crosses over several circuit courses, nor is a small portion to be used in one; rather, here, students are encouraged to remember every line on every page and that is its underlying philosophy. Furthermore this focused textbook is well produced with hard cover at less than half the price compared to all similar textbooks in the market. Thus, the intention has been to write a textbook that is used cover to cover for one basic course and is affordable to keep for life.
Overall, the textbook consists of 12 chapters that coherently construct new knowledge (as far as students are concerned) as it proceeds from one chapter to the next. Each chapter has a set of interesting problems to reflect on topics covered in the course in an orderly manner. In each chapter, a balance has been achieved to present various issues without too much repetition. Students are challenged to pay especial attention to the materials and topics covered in the course rather than number crunching. All in all the main contribution of this book has been to motivate and indeed encourage students to think, and allow them to rely on the knowledge gained and build upon that as they proceed – a real-life experience and the first step toward generating independent thinkers.