Customer Reviews

Engineering with Mathcad: Using Mathcad to Create and Organize your Engineering Calculations

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

 

 

This book provides the reader with access to many of the basic functions of mathcad. The author does this carefully and in some detail. But the book does not go far enough. There is nothing about differential equation solvers, nothing about random numbers, nothing about reading or writing data to or from a file and in fact nothing about engineering. What it is is a nice introduction to mathcad.

Brent Maxfield's Engineering with Mathcad is a valuable contribution to the engineering community that may do much to help those in engineering and the sciences in general jumpstart their efforts to learn and apply Mathcad, or to help long-time users strengthen their skills. The book is accessible, engaging, and written from the perspective of one who has dealt the practical aspects of Mathcad for many years. It comes with a useful CD having a handbook and all the examples in the text, allowing the users to easily follow along and work with the material being discussed. The CD also can be used to install Mathcad 13 for PC or Mac with a 120-day academic license.

The book covers a broad scope of material effectively, and should provide useful new insights even for power users. However, the book is not intended to provide a comprehensive guide to the functions and plotting features of Mathcad. For example, there is no significant discussion of solving differential equations. Indeed, many of the engineering applications covered are relatively basic, with the emphasis being more on how to use Mathcad effectively rather than how to tackle complex engineering problems. Given the burgeoning scope of Mathcad's tool and the many powerful features it has that experienced users may have been missing, Maxfield's approach represents a reasonable editorial decision to cover Mathcad broadly rather than to teach engineering mathematics or dive into the complexities of any of the numerous areas of interest in engineering.

The book may be especially valuable for those who are relatively new at Mathcad or who, like myself, have Mathcad experience but may not have used it for some time and need a refresher. But a carefully selected swathe of sophisticated aspects of Mathcad are treated that may be helpful to longtime Mathcad users who simply had no idea about some of the tools and capabilities they were overlooking.

With his years of Mathcad experience, Maxfield offers many tips, sometimes subtle, to guide users in creating worksheets, preventing errors, maintaining readability, selecting useful variable names, and so forth.

In general, I recommend Maxfield's book as an easy-to-read, well organized guide to help a wide range of Mathcad users learn techniques useful for engineering and many other fields as well.

I congratulate the author for an excellent book that I think will be helpful to numerous Mathcad users.

I'd like to give this book 5 stars. Brent Maxfield, a well-respected practicing engineer who has used Mathcad for many years, wrote this unique book by focusing on the functions and features most relevant to engineering practice. The book provides a comprehensive account of the important topics in four progressive parts, starting from step-by-step demonstration of basic Mathcad features to the creation of most comprehensive calculations, even integrating with calculations from other software programs such as Microsoft Excel. I believe even advanced Mathcad users could benefit from the fantastic coverage on how to better organize engineering calculations and learn how to embed other programs into Mathcad and assemble calculations from multiple Mathcad files.

This book explains every topic with abundant examples and illustrations. Therefore, the book is very easy to follow, especially when I repeat the examples in the computer at the same time.

I also like numerous insightful tips embedded throughout the book. I wish I had known some of them years ago. This well-thought-out book certainly fills an important need and serves as a useful guide for engineering students, engineering researchers, and the practicing professionals who want to use Mathcad efficiently to solve their problems.

As others have commented, the book is an excellent introduction to Mathcad, but is quite "light" on real-world worked engineering examples.

First-time Mathcad users will find it to be an extremely useful user's manual, and even experienced users will appreciate the structured approach, and will find the odd "gem" that they have never appreciated before.

My only critique is that there is very little in the way of practical worked examples of actual engineering analysis and design problems. You will need to look elsewhere if you are seeking "drag and drop" worksheets of stress analysis etc.

this is a very useful book for learning mathcad. the users of previous versions of mathcad will find some tricks for the new version (mathcad 13), but the title seems to much ambitious. the accompanying CD is a very good complement that really help, mainly thanks to the working mathcad installer. its license is limited to 4 months but those who don't have the complete program can use the demo version for really working with mathcad and decide if will be useful for them.

Very good book...I think you learn to use and programming Mathcad. I indeed would recommend this book.