Customer Reviews

Engineering Electromagnetics

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

 

 

This is the best book I ever found on this topic. Its assumes you a beginner and takes you to the engineering level. William Hayt has an outstanding way of communication with the reader. All you require is concentration and imagination power.

Chapters are as follows;

1- VECTOR ANALYSIS
2- COULUMB'S LAW AND ELECTRIC FIELD INTENSITY
3- ELECTRIC FLUX DENSITY
4- ENERGY AND POTENIAL
5- CONDUCTORS, DIELECTRICS AND CAPACITANCE
6- EXPERIMENTAL MAPPING METHODS
7- POISSON'S AND LAPLACE'S EQUATINS
8- THE STEADY MAGNETIC FIELD
9- MAGNETIC FORCES, MATERIALS AND INDUCTANCE
10- TIME VARYING FIELDS AND MAXWELL'S EQUATIONS
11- THE UNIFORM PLANE WAVE
12- PLANE WAVES AT BOUNARIES AND IN DISPERSIVE MEDIA
13- TRANSMISSION LINES
14- WAVEGUIDES AND ANTENNA FUNDAMENTALS

The book is well structured. First five chapters are specially of interest for beginners. End of chapter problems are challenging and tune up the concepts you learned in that chapter.

I strongly recommend this book to those who are interested in fundamentals of telecommunications.

This is one of my favorite Electromagnetics books and I don't understand why somebody has not reviewed this book yet for Amazon. It is a well written informative book on one of the more difficult subjects in Electrical Engineering. Excellent book Professor Hayt!

Aimed at Engineering students from beginning to intermediate i.e years 1 to 2 and perhaps 3. The style is detailed, unpretentious and original, with relevant problems and answers provided. Would have preferred the drawings to remain B&W though.

I used the book for a junior level course in Engineering Electromagnetics at UCLA in early 1971. The course was taught very well in terms of concepts by a Plasma Physicist who held a professorship in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA.

It is my belief this is an excellent book for teaching motivated students and for learning the subject in depth at the outset. Though it is not in my view a good reference book as a few others at roughly the same level or higher for the purpose of browsing to pick up key ideas and concepts with engineering applications (e.g., Krause's excellent book on Electromagnetics), yet it is very well organized in that all concepts presented are built up one upon another in a closely connected, coherent and systematic fashion analytically with vector methods, and difficult physical ideas are often pictorially illustrated with diagrams in color. This is true in both the older edition and the 5th edition (1989), being that there are not really a lot of significant differences between the editions.

The book starts with vector calculus and basic underlying ideas in electrostatics (Coulomb's Law), and goes onto Gauss's Law, energy and potential, electric currents and conduction, electric fields, capacitance, dielectric materials and other related topics (e.g., refraction). It then progresses into steady magnetic field, inductance and eventually toward Maxwell's equations and engineering applications. There is no lack of mathematical methods which are treated as needed and sufficient in depth all throughout the book, e.g., divergence theorem, Laplace's and Poisson's equations and related boundary value problems. The book ends with uniform plane waves (as an approximate model of the propagating EM wave), and discusses transmission line models which then lead to applications. The only regrettable aspect is the brief treatment of antennas as the subject is barely touched upon as part of EM radiation, and the only tangible real-world example I could recall was a dipole antenna.

As a summary, this is a well written book, albeit a somewhat introductory text designed for Electrical Engineering juniors and seniors by a seasoned Purdue professor. It will help tremendously if the instructor is good at explaining concepts and illustrating them (as was mine in 1971). I must say I love the subject because I had such good instruction and learning experiences based on this book which I had to refer to many times over the years.

In taking an Engineering Electromagnetics course, I was very disappointed with the instruction of the course; therefore I turned to this textbook for help. Unfortunately, this book is packed with errors, both in the text, and more commonly the end of chapter problems. For such a theoretical subject, the explanation is lacking, and example problems are few and far between. In addition, there are no answers in the back of the book, and the answers available online or on CD-ROM are not all correct, according to my professor. Sigh. All in all, these factors combined to make this a very difficult course, the worst that I have had in my 3.5 years of engineering education.

Read this book from cover-to-cover a few years ago to brush up on E&M theory.

I have always been partial to Hayt as an author of classic EE titles and this book did not disappoint. The prose was clean, the development logical and the treatment adequately thorough for an undergrad text.

For those who find their first class in E&M a little daunting, I would strongly recommend the little book: "Div, Grad, Curl and All That" by H.M. Shey. This informal text covers all of the vector calculus essential to basic E&M theory with lots of worked examples and problems with solutions. My advice is to bone up on vector calculus first -- it makes E&M theory much more accessible.

As an introductory level textbook, this is terrible. There are barely any examples and the problems are badly worded. Be warned: There is an addendum that goes with the book, because there are a significant number of mistakes.

My engineering professors amaze me. The get the most ridiculous books ever created for a course, then they expect the students to solve the end of chapter problems that they cannot even solve themselves. My teacher spent forty mintues on the board trying to solve a end of chapter problem in this book. The bad part was that he had to keep refering to his solution manual to see how the problem was solved. The guy has a BS and MS degree in physics and a PHD in EE.

It's a bit of na shock if someone with a physics degree cannot solve problems in a text designed for an undergraduate course.

Bottomline: SOlving the problems in this book are impossible. My whole class complains left and right about the end of chapter problems. All the teacher can say is to practice more problems. Yeah that's all nice, but how the in the heck will you know if a solution is correct if you have no soultions at the end of the chapter. And to make matters worse, I don't think he can even solve those problems himself.

Other problems with this book:
-SOme of the theory is okay, but alot of it the author explains in a confusing way.
-Mistakes one after another for certain problems.

I want to learn the subject because I like physics, but I want to learn the subject. Not hate the subject because of a useless book.

I don't recommend this book.

Actually I kind of liked this book. I was in the department of mechanical engineering when I took an introductory EM course using this textbook (sixth edition) about six years ago (I became the teaching assistant for that course afterward). Everything worked out well. Both the instructor and the book explained things well and I worked out many of the end-of-chapter problems.