Fundamentals of Electric Circuits, Second Edition (Book & CD-ROM) [Hardcover]

Charles K. Alexander (Author), Matthew Sadiku (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0073048356 | ISBN-13: 978-0073048352 | Publication Date: May 26, 2004 | Edition: 2

Fundamentals of Electric Circuits, 2e is intended for use in the introductory circuit analysis or circuit theory course taught in electrical engineering or electrical engineering technology departments. The main objective of this book is to present circuit analysis in a clear, easy-to-understand manner, with many practical applications to interest the student.

Each chapter opens with either historical sketches or career information on a subdiscipline of electrical engineering. This is followed by an introduction that includes chapter objectives. Each chapter closes with a summary of the key points and formulas.

The authors present principles in an appealing and lucid step-by-step manner, carefully explaining each step. Important formulas are highlighted to help students sort out what is essential and what is not. Many pedagogical aids reinforce the concepts learned in the text so that students get comfortable with the various methods of analysis presented in the text.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr. Charles K. Alexander (Athens, OH) is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ohio and served as the President and CEO of the IEEE from 1996-1999.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1022 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math; 2 edition (May 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0073048356
• ISBN-13: 978-0073048352
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #885,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Understandable First Book on Electric Circuits, February 4, 2006

By 

David A. Lessnau (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fundamentals of Electric Circuits (Hardcover)

Since the reviews for most of the other first Circuit Analysis books I could find were fairly uniform in their negative opinion on the understandability of those books, I was worried about this book. But, since the reviews of the previous version were very good, I thought I'd give it a try. Basically, I'm very impressed with it. Since I'm working through the book on my own without any peers or professors available to clarify things, the book I use HAS to be readable. This one is. The authors clearly explain almost everything (there are a few minor omissions of (non-core) material that the authors consider to be Intuitively Obvious to the Most Casual Observer (i.e., stuff they thought everyone would have run into from everyday life)). Within each section of each chapter, they immediately follow every concept with several Examples showing how to work with the material and Practice problems for the reader to do. So, if you don't immediately understand the theory, there are several applications available to help you along. At the end of the chapter, the book includes:

- A Summary of the material covered.
- Answered Review Questions.
- About 100 Exercises. These are broken up into sections so you know which ones require what material. The odd ones are answered at the back of the book.
- Comprehensive Exercises which use all the material covered.

In the Preface, the authors describe the book as:

"...[W]ritten for a two-semester or three-quarter course in linear circuit analysis.... It is broadly divided into three parts. Part 1, consisting of Chapters 1 to 8, is devoted to dc circuits.... Part 2, which contains Chapter 9 to 14, deals with ac circuits.... Part 3, consisting of Chapters 15 to 19 is devoted to advanced techniques for network analysis.... [T]he main prerequisites... are physics and calculus. A very important asset of this text is that ALL the mathematical equations and fundamentals of physics needed by the student are included in the text."

From what I can see, that's a very good description of the book.

The only negatives I can find in the book are all minor. Occasionally, there's a wrong answer (AFAIK). There are also a couple of cases where the authors put new information into the exercises instead of covering it in the text. Slightly more serious is that in some cases the Example and Sample problems focus on problems with certain attributes. But, the Exercises will then focus on problems with entirely different (unexplained) attributes. It takes some work to translate these into the material covered in the section. Also, I'd have preferred having Exercises at the end of each section instead of clumped together at the end of the chapter. The end-of-chapter Exercises should be limited to the Review Questions and Comprehensive Exercises. It would also have been nice if McGraw Hill had provided a PDF version of the book on their web site (ARIS) for registered users (there's a registration code in the front of the book).

My biggest complaint is probably regarding the tools used in the book: PSpice (a circuit simulator), KCIDE (an integrated design environment for circuit analysis), and MATLAB (a symbolic manipulator and solver). PSpice 9.1 used throughout the text of the book. Unfortunately, KCIDE uses PSpice 10.0. From what I can find on the web, the two PSpice versions don't play nicely together. So, you really have a choice of using the version of the tool used in the book or using the version required by another tool used in the book. MATLAB, unlike PSpice and KCIDE, doesn't have a free student version. As a replacement for it, I used Maxima (available from SourceForge).

Still, all the complaints are minor. I found the book to be very readable and rate it at a Very Good 4 stars out of 5.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent job for a circuit textbook, June 4, 2005

By 

ohio undergrad (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fundamentals of Electric Circuits with CD-ROM (Hardcover)

Compared to other standard circuit textbooks which are available out there, this one has done an excellent job. It is written in a readable style that is so rare among textbooks in this field. The flow from topic to topic is straightforwardly continuous and the reading can even be very enjoyable (especially the introduction to each chapter). I very much wish there were more circuit textbooks written like this one, so that you can read and learn by yourself. But very unfortunately, most of them are extremely unreadable and so untransparent in their presentation of fundamental concepts (you only have to take a look at texts such as Nilsson or even Dorf). For this reason, I think, Alexander's book deserves even more credit.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT BOOK, June 29, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fundamentals of Electric Circuits with CD-ROM (Hardcover)

This is a very fine book. It explains the concepts very clearly and maybe used for signals too, when studying fourier and laplace transforms. The authors do a superb job and make challenging concepts sound easy for the student. Extremely organized and well prepared book.