Customer Reviews

Advanced Engineering Mathematics: A Computer Approach, Seventh Edition (Mathematics Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Being an Engineering Student, I require a practical approach to Mathematics, even to Pure Maths. Following extensive research for the "Perfect Book", I saw this one and it immediately caught my attention due to the effectiveness of its explanations as well as the broad cover of syllabus, from matrices, algebra and vectors, to Statistics and Probability and Fortran.

Highly recommended for every Engineering Student. I truly believe there will be no need for any other book, at least during the Undergrad.

The first thought I got upon receiving this book was wow, this thing is absolutely MASSIVE. Like hope-you-don't-need-to-carry-it-on-campus massive. The reason being it's full of advanced topics; I doubt I'll come across anything in my career that won't be covered somewhere in this book.

While the book lacks explanation in some areas (or tries to be too concise about certain topics), it makes up by the large number of example problems it has for each section. Some math books are skimpy on the examples leaving the reader scratching their head of how to apply the topic presented to them, but this book is just the opposite.

The reason I docked it a star is because the book does have its share of errors. I used this book in a graduate math class for engineers/scientists and would literally spend hours upon hours trying to get my homework solutions to match the book's solutions, only to later discover I had it right and the book was wrong. Our professor said this was a good thing and that we had to have more faith in ourselves, but honestly, when taking a class and learning the material for the first time, your first instinct upon getting an answer that doesn't match the book's was that you made a mistake somewhere. So ultimately, the book's errors wasted untold hours of my time. Instead of making me have more faith in my mathematical abilities, it just frustrated me.

Another problem is that the index in this book is absolutely terrible. For such a huge book you think it would have a comprehensive index. Instead, it has maybe 8 or 9 entries per letter. In that respect it makes it difficult to use the book as a reference book.

Other than that, I wish other science books would take a cue from this one in that more examples than necessary is always better than too-few. I never had too many issues solving a problem from this book because there was almost always a similar example.