Schaum's Outline of Electric Circuits

Author : Mahmood Nahvi Edition : 4 Number of Pages : 400 Publisher : McGraw-Hill List Price : $18.95 Amazon Price : $9.50 Used Price : $6.70

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Confusing Textbooks? Missed Lectures? Not Enough Time?

Fortunately for you, there's Schaum's Outlines. More than 40 million students have trusted Schaum's to help them succeed in the classroom and on exams. Schaum's is the key to faster learning and higher grades in every subject. Each Outline presents all the essential course information in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. You also get hundreds of examples, solved problems, and practice exercises to test your skills.

This Schaum's Outline gives you

• Practice problems with full explanations that reinforce knowledge
• Coverage of the most up-to-date developments in your course field
• In-depth review of practices and applications

Fully compatible with your classroom text, Schaum's highlights all the important facts you need to know. Use Schaum's to shorten your study time-and get your best test scores!

Schaum's Outlines-Problem Solved.

Customer reviews

Not a good one by .. A. Obalereko ()
I had purchased this book due to all the good reviews it had, was going to use it in addition to my circuit textbook to help me out in the class, it turned out to be a waste of money, bad explanation and did not have enough examples

Circuits by .. Larry H. Harris ()
This book covers the first two levels of Engineering classes on circuit analysis. A great study aid and test prep.

textbook standard by .. Books Lover ()
This is the book that should be made as textbook for ECE textbook, instead of all those big, fat, and expensive ones. ECE textbooks should be like this! precise, to-the-point, clarity, lots of detailed examples! I hate schools that just want to make more profit from students by having them to buy those new expensive books. of course, there's no way to cover all those materials in those kinds of books.

decent materials but bad binding by .. Dolly Lemon (San Francisco, CA)
The book itself is a decent collection of practice problems. However, I ended up with a copy that was stiched together improperly. For some reason, the first 32 pages appears twice, skipping the the second 32 pages of the book such that parts of chapter 3 and all of chapter 4 are completely missing. I couldn't return the item due to the policy of the seller regarding books lik Shaum's, but I was given the publisher's phone number. Let's hope I can get this resolved satisfactorily.

Excellent supplemental textbook on circuit analysis and design topics by .. calvinnme (Fredericksburg, Va)
This is an excellent study guide for electrical engineering students that will serve them well in their two-semester DC circuits sequence, linear circuits, electronic circuit design sequence, and power circuits. It is another one of those Schaum's outlines that is clear and complete enough to double as a textbook on the topic of circuit analysis and design. It starts out defining basic electric circuit concepts and terms such as potential, charge, current, resistance, capacitance, and inductance. It then moves on to circuit laws and then circuit analysis methods. It then explains the amplifier model in terms of components that have already been defined, and from there describes the operational amplifier and shows how to design using this device. The chapter on waveforms and signals is an excellent one, and is a topic often overlooked and shortchanged in most electrical engineering textbooks. The chapters on first-order and higher-order circuits do an excellent job of venturing into the world of linear RLC circuits and shows how to use calculus and differential equations to solve for the voltage and current equations of these types of circuits. Included also are more direct methods of analysis including complex frequency and pole-zero plots. The next major topic to be broached is that of analysis and design of power circuits. This is an often ignored subject in the electrical engineering curriculum, and the two chapters are good foundations on the topic. Besides just explaining polyphase power circuits, the outline actually takes the time to explain why such circuits are desirable when power generation is the goal. The next three chapters do some clean up on miscellaneous circuit analysis and design topics - frequency response, two-port networks and their characteristics, and mutual inductance and transformers, which is the basis of courses on electromechanical machines. The chapter on mutual inductance is the weakest chapter in the book, with less explanation than in the rest of the outline. There is a good chapter on using the industry standard Spice and PSpice software for circuit design. The final two chapters are applied chapters on the Laplace and Fourier transforms and their use in circuit analysis and design. For those whose basic mathematics may be rusty, the appendices cover basic matrix algebra and the mathematics of complex numbers.

I used the first edition of this outline in the late 70's to help iron out concepts that were not clearly presented in my undergraduate textbooks. I kept it around over the years to serve as a reference. I just recently upgraded to the current fourth edition, and the subject matter and organization of material has changed over the years but not the high quality of the content. I highly recommend this outline to undergraduate electrical engineering students who want a high quality supplemental textbook that will serve them from their sophomore year until graduation. One reviewer lamented that there were quite a few errors in the solved problem sections. However, this review was very old - 1999 I believe - and was written before this current fourth edition was written. I have not found any errors in the solutions so far, so apparently this latest edition has cleared up that past problem.

Fundamentals of Electric Circuits

Author : Charles Alexander Edition : 4 Number of Pages : 1056 Publisher : McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math Amazon Price : $160.54 Used Price : $168.10

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A balance of theory, worked examples and extended examples, practice problems, and real-world applications, combined with over 350 new homework problems for the fourth edition and robust media offerings, renders the fourth edition the most comprehensive and student-friendly approach to linear circuit analysis. .

This edition adds the Design a Problem feature which helps students develop their design skills by having the student develop the question as well as the solution. There are over 100 Design a Problem exercises integrated into the problem sets in the book.. .

Alexander/Sadiku also offers you the convenience of ARIS -- the text-specific web site -- which allows you to assign homework online or create printed homework sets and solutions to your students. The website also features solutions and KCIDE software, which reinforces the books problem-solving approach.. .

Customer reviews

Great book....covers alot by .. Jay (Kings Point, NY)
This book is pretty good...little or no mistakes. However, the authors could have gone into a little more detail in explaining basic concepts. All in all, this book is a must-have.

Good book, with some minor problems by .. Varun Rahimtoola (Los Angeles, CA United States)
Overall this is a really great book with lots of examples and good problems, however my complaint is that some of the problems haven't been covered in the examples and so they are too difficult to solve. For instance, in the chapter on node voltages, none of the examples covers floating voltage sources that have other components like resistors in series with them, yet a number of the problems involve such floating voltage sources. I had to refer to the Schaum's Outline of Basic Circuit Analysis (another very good book, btw) to find an example problem for that.
If you're looking for books on electric circuits, however, I would definitely recommend this one along with the Schaum's Outline book I mentioned above.

Good Book by .. aspiring EE (AR, USA)
This book is very good for understanding some basic circuits concepts, but it does not discuss topics like sequential switching, unboudned response. But overall, I would highly recommend this book.

Very Understandable First Book on Electric Circuits by .. David A. Lessnau (Niceville, FL USA)
Since the reviews for most of the other first Circuit Analysis books I could find were fairly uniform in their negative opinion on the understandability of those books, I was worried about this book. But, since the reviews of the previous version were very good, I thought I'd give it a try. Basically, I'm very impressed with it. Since I'm working through the book on my own without any peers or professors available to clarify things, the book I use HAS to be readable. This one is. The authors clearly explain almost everything (there are a few minor omissions of (non-core) material that the authors consider to be Intuitively Obvious to the Most Casual Observer (i.e., stuff they thought everyone would have run into from everyday life)). Within each section of each chapter, they immediately follow every concept with several Examples showing how to work with the material and Practice problems for the reader to do. So, if you don't immediately understand the theory, there are several applications available to help you along. At the end of the chapter, the book includes:

- A Summary of the material covered.
- Answered Review Questions.
- About 100 Exercises. These are broken up into sections so you know which ones require what material. The odd ones are answered at the back of the book.
- Comprehensive Exercises which use all the material covered.

In the Preface, the authors describe the book as:

"...[W]ritten for a two-semester or three-quarter course in linear circuit analysis.... It is broadly divided into three parts. Part 1, consisting of Chapters 1 to 8, is devoted to dc circuits.... Part 2, which contains Chapter 9 to 14, deals with ac circuits.... Part 3, consisting of Chapters 15 to 19 is devoted to advanced techniques for network analysis.... [T]he main prerequisites... are physics and calculus. A very important asset of this text is that ALL the mathematical equations and fundamentals of physics needed by the student are included in the text."

From what I can see, that's a very good description of the book.

The only negatives I can find in the book are all minor. Occasionally, there's a wrong answer (AFAIK). There are also a couple of cases where the authors put new information into the exercises instead of covering it in the text. Slightly more serious is that in some cases the Example and Sample problems focus on problems with certain attributes. But, the Exercises will then focus on problems with entirely different (unexplained) attributes. It takes some work to translate these into the material covered in the section. Also, I'd have preferred having Exercises at the end of each section instead of clumped together at the end of the chapter. The end-of-chapter Exercises should be limited to the Review Questions and Comprehensive Exercises. It would also have been nice if McGraw Hill had provided a PDF version of the book on their web site (ARIS) for registered users (there's a registration code in the front of the book).

My biggest complaint is probably regarding the tools used in the book: PSpice (a circuit simulator), KCIDE (an integrated design environment for circuit analysis), and MATLAB (a symbolic manipulator and solver). PSpice 9.1 used throughout the text of the book. Unfortunately, KCIDE uses PSpice 10.0. From what I can find on the web, the two PSpice versions don't play nicely together. So, you really have a choice of using the version of the tool used in the book or using the version required by another tool used in the book. MATLAB, unlike PSpice and KCIDE, doesn't have a free student version. As a replacement for it, I used Maxima (available from SourceForge).

Still, all the complaints are minor. I found the book to be very readable and rate it at a Very Good 4 stars out of 5.

Great by .. NAB (Pakistan)
This is a decent start for novice engineers. Unlike other texts on the same subject it has very effective methodology of teaching the very basic concepts of electric circuits. A bulk of solved examples is there to help you understand techniques of circuit analysis. It really soothed me when I was suffering from "circuit phobia". This text is highly recommended by me for beginners.

Introduction to Electric Circuits

Author : Richard C. Dorf Edition : 7 Number of Pages : 880 Publisher : Wiley Amazon Price : $49.99 Used Price : $40.00

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Customer reviews

Electric Circuits, 6th Edition, Dorf and Svoboda by .. Apostle (Charlottesville, Virginia USA)
"Electric Circuits," 6th Edition by Dorf and Svoboda rates as the WORST text I've ever used in my undergraduate or graduate training. While it has many helpful tables and illustrations, the core-material presentation is garbled and not easily understood. This is complicated further by an inexcusable plethora of errors contained throughout the text. Though the authors are obviously knowledgeable in the subject matter, from me they earn a grade of "F" for their ability as writers. When used as an adjunct or self-learning text, where the student's knowledge comes directly from the textbook and without the aid of live lectures, this book is useless.

The following three textbooks cover the SAME material as Dorf and are much better suited as adjunct and self-learning texts. These are presented in the order of recommendation to you: (Monier is by far the best of all)

1. "Electric Circuit Analysis," by Charles J. Monier, 2001, Prentice Hall.

This text is EXCELLENT. As the chapter material and the math progress in complexity (up to LaPlace Transforms) the author inserts "math review chapters," which are especially helpful. The material is presented clearly and in an exact fashion in this book.

2. "Electric Circuits," by Alenander and Sadiku

3. "Introductory Circuit Analysis," by Robert L. Boylestad

Unless you're taking a lecture course directly from the authors or have access to a professor familiar with all the errors and quirks of this text, don't waste your time with it.

Disclaimer: I have no financial or business relationship or interests in any of the texts discussed here.

Horrible!!! by .. spyder (IL)
This is the worst book to teach basic foundation skills to future electrical engineers. It assumes that readers are genuises and is definitely not for beginners. It is very difficult to follow and understand. The examples are mediocre and the problems are difficult. It omits key steps in solving some of the problems. It's exponentially frustrating when your university prescribes it as a textbook.(Did the course coordinators even try to read it from a beginner's point of view?) It's only good as a doorstop, paper weight, a projectile to throw at a non-sensical, pretentious PhD student teaching the class(or at least that's what he/she thinks they're doing), or in extreme cases, a toilet paper. Horrible book! Good for bonfires though.

This book is for skilled Electrical Engineering Students by .. Troy Edwards ()
If you want a book that holds your hand and babies you through circuit theory, than this book is not for you. Mastery of advanced calculus, and calculus based physics is necessary.

Having said that, being able to understand what is in this book will set you apart from an EET. You use this book because you want to be an EE. (You know, the guy who is the EET's boss. hehe)

This is a well presented book for a skilled enginering student.
You will know more about circuit theory than the average joe tech will ever know.

Saying you can't understand this book is like saying you can't understand Advanced Quantum Mechanics because it has too much math.

Don't be a baby. Just take your 3 semesters of calculus w/ differential equations and 2 semesters of calculus based physics
and then and only then will you be ready for this book. When you are done with this book, you will be a certified EE genius :)

And tell the EET's that they will be working for you. HEHE.

Really just so so by .. Duran Haschim (Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
This book ist not too different in quality from Nilsson, quite normal; some topics are explained okay, others lack a bit of depth in derivation. But the problems are not very fun to solve.

Enjoyable textbook for passionate students by .. James (Australia)
This is a very good textbook for passionate students who have a solid background in physics and mathematics. It is not suitable for the average freshman, nor is it suitable for technical or trades students.

When I say a solid background, I mean you had better be an A student in physics and mathematics otherwise you'll gradually be left behind.

Dorf doesn't baby students with this book. High school education has been dumbed down disgracefully these days as bright students are "streamed" with the not-so-bright. School education is politically correct and has been excessively feminized and made "inclusive." That means bright students should find a good school, or work by themselves, and work hard.

This is not to say that readers who have problems with this book are not very bright. It could mean they've had a bad high school education or their college/university dumbed down their mathematics and physics courses in response to the high drop-out rates. You need to be *very* good with, as a minimum, first year mathematics (calculus, linear algebra) and physics (calculus based physics). Don't make this text your first ever introduction to circuits and things like voltage, resistance, current, and so on. You should have met all these in your physics courses! (I *did* say you need a solid background in physics, didn't I?)

If you have a bit of time before using this book, or you want to repeat a class that uses this book, grab yourself a copy of Basic Technical Mathematics with Calculus (SI Version) 8th Edition by Washington, and work your way from there with more advanced engineering mathematics texts. Also pick up Grossman's Elementary Linear Algebra, or Strang's Linear Algebra. Now get yourself a good physics text, such as the Six Ideas in Physics series, and understand it. It may also help to familiarize yourself with basic electric circuits by working your way through a more elementary text that doesn't use calculus (assuming you need to work on your math before using this text, of course).

Go for it!

LabVIEW for Electric Circuits, Machines, Drives, and Laboratories (National Instruments Virtual Instrumentation Series)

Author : Nesimi Ertugrul Number of Pages : 436 Publisher : Prentice Hall PTR List Price : $85.00 Amazon Price : $56.99 Used Price : $56.25

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Electric Circuits Problem Solver (Problem Solvers)

Author : The Staff of REA delete Edition : Rev Sub Number of Pages : 1176 Publisher : Research & Education Association List Price : $30.95 Amazon Price : $17.99 Used Price : $5.66

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