Customer Reviews

Elements of Electromagnetics (Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I purchased this book as an additional reference for an electromagnetics course I am taking for a master's program. My background is chemical engineering so the only previous exposure I have had to electromagnetics was in sophomore physics. The book recommended for the course was Cheng's Fundamentals of Engineering Electromagnetics. I have also checked out Electromagnetics for Engineers by Ulaby. So can compare them all. Sadiku's book has the most thorough review of vectors, coordinate transformation and vector calculus. For a guy like me who finished undergraduate studies 15 years ago, this was very attractive. Instead buying another math book to review this material, it was all contained in the same book. The other EM books I compared also had the math review, but Sadiku's is the most complete. Cheng's is much too terse. If you are going straight into graduate school, this thorough treatment would likely be a waste of space for you. If you are the typical upper division undergraduate, the math review will likley be useful. For electrostatics and magnetostatics, I have found Sadiku to be the most thorough. He develops all of the equations carefully, and his treatment of boundary value problems was much more complete than the other three texts. For Maxwell's equations and plane waves, I liked Ulaby a little better. Sadiku puts everything into one chapter - the wave equation, polarization, propagation in lossy media, normal and oblique transmission and reflection. I preferred breaking this into some pieces to digest carefully. The sections on new applications of EM principles are welcome additions to the text and help to connect the material to new technology that is relevant.

One area where Sadiku shines is in the example problems. For one, there are lots of worked examples - more than Cheng or Ulaby. He does not assume the reader can follow great leaps, but instead he works through the mathematic operations step by step. This has been useful for me. It has helped me to see how to think through the problems and understand what the phyiscal phenonema are. It also takes the fear of the math out of the picture. Once I could see how the problems are worked, I realized I actually knew the math well enough. Cheng on the other provides very few examples and skips enough steps so as to make the examples intimidating instead of illuminating. Ulaby has lots of examples (more than Cheng), but is also a little terse in the explantions.

Ulaby is the best in the summary of equations and concepts in reference tables. He compiles all of the most useful equations into tables that are easy to find and use. For example in the section on lossy media, there are about 20 equations summarized in table. The most general case is covered, but so are the three most common simplications of the general case - lossless dielectric, low-loss dielectric and good conductor. In the other texts, you have to flip through the chapter on lossy media - back and forth - to dig up the equations needed. Ulaby also has a modern lay out that is very appealing. It just makes the text less intimidating.

Cheng is a very compact and economical in use of space - but too terse for me. I might recommend it to those who already know the subject and need a reference to quickly review key ideas. He skimps on diagrams and skips too many steps in solving problems.

Sadiku is also up to date in format and color. He uses diagrams where needed, and there are some clever tables show analogies between electric and magnetic phenomena.Overall, Sadiku is a solid reference. I have seen other reviewers comment that the 3rd edition was chocked full of editorial errors. I have not seen any issues with the 4th edition. However, I am not reading this as carefully as the Ulaby and Cheng books (as required by my class), so I may have missed some issues.

Theory wise, the book exposes things relatively well. However, I cannot get over how thoroughly maddening it is to be second-guessing the answers in the back of the book when you're trying to learn by doing. For ...sake, it's the 3rd edition and it's still full of errors! Inexcusable! There's no way to build confidence in problem solving when many of the solutions to the odd numbered problems are wrong! No matter how clear the theory, it's still a work in progress, incomplete at best. It is, quite frankly, shameful to be passing this book off as some sort of learning tool.

Sadiku knows how to teach. The material is presented in a very carefully organized manner, each logical step explained clearly. A little patience and persistence and you can really make progress.

I am retired physicist who has had the chance to read many E & M texts. I decided to take a course at the University and they use this text. To my very pleasant surprize, this book , I find is excellent. It has filled in many gaps in my understanding of the subject in a way which other texts never did. It is laid out quite nicely and has the basic idea all 'up front' and very easy to recognize, understand and remember. I feel that this book has filled in so many of the 'nuances' of E & M that I didnt understand before , so now I am able to go back to some of the more difficult texts, like Stratton, and begin to understand them at a much higher level. I am using the 4th edition, so I am not familiar with the 'errors' in the solutions, etc. I have not seen any of these in the 4th edition. I definitely recommend this textbook as the best one to use in an Introductory Course. It has truly furthered my understanding of E & M moreso then any other text.

A Little bit of history about me:
I barely passed my course in Electromagnetism before 12 years. This course was a complete night-mare for me. Now I really wish I had access to this book before 12 years, I might have as well made a career in RF; that is how much this book has made the subject accessible and more importantly lovable.

About the book:
This book has a very intuitive and logical structure to it. In the first two pages, he introduces Maxwell's equations and sheerly states that the subject of EM revolves around this. He does not visit it for the next 8 chapters. The first three chapter has a beautiful coverage of the Vector algebra foundation required to understand the rest of the text.

The next three chapter explains Electrostatics, followed by 2 chapters of Magnetostatics. The discussion then continues what happens Electric and magnetic forces are not static anymore and becomes dynamic. The way the author builds the topic is like a well-written movie plot. This must be one of the best books ever on electromagetism, if not the best.

Full credits to the author for the clarity of thought and the clarity with which he communicates that to the reader.

By the way, I have the fourth edition of the book and I do not know about the errors in the solutions. I assume that would have been taken care of, after receiving so much flak from the readers. If i find any errors in solutions later, I promise to revisit the review.

Buy this book, you will not regret.

After reading and owning other EM books (including Ulaby) I have to say that this is the best text I have come across. It is ordered in a logical manner; it includes most, if not all, of the classic EM example problems (something Ulaby lacks), and there are plenty of worked-out examples and exercises so that readers can know what is going on. Sadiku doesn't skip over some of the basic math steps, but leaves nearly trivial sequences in the example problems so that all can follow along. At the end of the chapter is a good study guide, and some multiple choice review questions (with answers) to really help the student grasp the concepts.

Of course, you get out of it what you put into it. All in all, it is the best EM/Fields book I have seen. It think it would even be a decent reference for lectures, if you happen to find yourself forced to teach from another book without some of the classic problems worked out. I just read nearly the whole thing (the 3rd ed. and skipped the vector analysis section), and I'm giving this from a student perspective, not a teacher perspective. I really don't think the other student reviews (negative ones) are accurate at all.

The author states that electromagnetic theory is one of the most diffucult couses in your curriculm, but he sure doesn't make it easy on you.
The text is laced with errors, from the text itself, to missing symbols, to errors in the solutions at the end of the book.
It is extremely frustrating to work on problems only to find that the error given in the Appendix is wrong.
It is a shame that in its 3rd edition (as well as the revised 3rd edition) that errors are still present in the text

This can be a much better book if the editors spend some time to proof-read it. I like the way the author present the materials. The examples are good and the explanations are clear. But THERE ARE SO MANY ERRORS which I believe will confuse many students. Most errors are trivial- wrong sign, wrong font, or wrong symbols. Unless the teacher can help the students to correct the errors, I cannot recommend this book as the text book for EM theory.

This book (3rd edition) is from hell. The TA who solved/wrote the problems in this book was clearly on crack. Not even the solutions manual can be trusted to have the right answer. This is one of the few books I've found where you would be better off without solutions, since so many of those given are completely and utterly wrong.
It is interesting to note that you sometimes have to look at the solutions manual to understand what the hell the problem is actually supposed to say.
This book teaches electromagnetics and baldness. The latter comes from tearing out ones hair looking for the problem in ones work that doesn't actually exist, but does exist in the solutions you are comparing your work to.
Two stars because the book functions nicely as a club and projectile.

This book is ecellent explaining the material, it gives a lot of examples and a lot of exercices with the solutions to the odd numbers which is something good. The problem that make it a 4 stars book is the presence of lots of errors, including error in the solutins of the exercises.