Customer Reviews

Bioengineering Fundamentals

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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Dr. Saterbak is pretty much the mother of all Rice undergrad bioe's, and to meet a general lack of decent intro bioe textbooks at the time, she and some members of our department began to write this book.

Given her experience at teaching undergrads, this book meets expectations. It is clear and well-written. It contains a lot of equations, but that's because it's an intro engineering textbook. In other words, the book is all about different kinds of balances (mass, momentum, energy, etc.). Despite this, the equations are still presented in a very logical way that was easy to refer to back then, doing all those problem sets. It still continues to be a go-to reference text.

The problems, though, are crazy difficult. They're meant to be extremely challenging, and on average, we used to get assigned only 6 from a chapter a week (it'd take 4 of us 8hrs on average). Interestingly, some other intro bioe classes mistakenly choose to assign a lot more problems a week, thinking that it's like your typical textbook with easy problems. Not the case here.

Finally, the case studies at the end are a nice addition, being closely patterned after term design projects that have been tried and tested on our students in the past. They present big biomedical problems in a context that allows you to call in stuff you have learned from the rest of the book. Overall, a lot of the material will seem tedious, but in the end, you'll be surprised at your newfound capacity for analytical thinking. This book doesn't teach as much "knowledge" as it develops a skill. But of course, you've gotta do the problems...

Worth the price. Had some wear on the outside (like it was handled a lot), but inside was in great shape.

I enjoyed Saterbak's investigation of fundamentals of engineering, especially since our instructor was very young (maybe a little green) -- he made great use of the text, relying on Saterbak's organization and strategic presentation of the work to lead the class from day 1 thru finals :)
An example of synergy, thank you Bill (ASU) and Ann (Rice).