Introduction to Electric Circuits [Hardcover]

Richard C. Dorf (Author), James A. Svoboda (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471127027 | ISBN-13: 978-0471127024 | Publication Date: January 18, 1996 | Edition: 3

From space station photo cells to superconducting electromagnets to electric shark control fences, readers see first hand how the material in this book relates to actual problems faced by engineers today. This brings the subject to life like no other book!

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Build valuable design and analysis skills with the leader in circuits education

A remarkably accessible approach, numerous design problems, MATLAB examples, and a real-world focus on the circuits that we encounter everyday---there are just a few reasons why Dorf and Svoboda's INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRIC CIRCUITS has been so successful at helping students master circuit analysis and design.

In their Fifth Edition, the authors have revised and enhanced their student-oriented text with several significant new changes, including:

• Coverage of Fourier transforms
• Revised set of problems and exercises, including more accessible design problems and examples that illustrate the solution to problems on the CD-ROM packaged with this text
• Revised chapter summaries in a new bullet-point format with summarizing tables

But most importantly, this Fifth Edition provides students with the opportunity to hone their design and analysis skills with the new Electronic Teaching Assistant (ETA) on the Student Resource CD-ROM packed in this text.

Practice and experiment with the new Electronic Teaching Assistant!

The ETA features a powerful set of interactive learning tools in a web-based browser. These tools includes:

The Electric Circuits Workout. Develop and practice circuit analysis skills with this unique set or exercises, similar to quiz or exam problems.

The Circuit Design Lab. These labs offer essential experimentation and design experience. Each lab exercise presents a circuit together with scroll bars that control the values of important circuit parameters.

The Interactive Illustrations. These illustrations help the user to recognize connections between related concepts. They allow users to change key aspects of an illustration while observing the consequences. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Richard C. Dorf professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in electrical engineering in the fields of circuits and control systems. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, an M.S. from the University of Colorado and a B.S. from Clarkson University. Highly concerned with the discipline of electrical engineering and its wide value to social and economic needs, he has written and lectured internationally on the contributions and advances in electrical engineering.
Professor Dorf has extensive experience with education and industry and its professionally active in the fields of robotics, automation, electric circuits, and communications. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; The Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; of California, Berkeley.
A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Dr. Dorf is widely known to the profession for his Modern Control Systems, Eighth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 1998) and The International Encyclopedia of Robotics (Wiley 1988). Dr. Dorf is also the coauthor of Circuits, Devices and Systems (with Ralph Smith), Fifth Edition (Wiley, 1992). Dr. Dorf edited the widely used Electrical Engineering Handbook, Second Edition (CRC Press and IEEE Press) published in 1997.

James A. Svoboda is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Clarkson University where he teaches courses on topics such as circuits electronics, and computer programming. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and M.S. from the University of Colorado, and a B. S. from General Motors Institute.
Sophomore Circuits is one of Professor Svoboda's favorite courses. He has taught this course to 2500 undergraduates at Clarkson University over the past 21 years. In 1996, he received Clarkson University's Distinguished Teaching Award.
Professor Svoboda has written several research papers describing the advantages of  using nullors to model electric circuits for computer analysis. He is interested in the way technology affects engineering education and has developed several software packages for use in Sophomore Circuits.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1024 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 3 edition (January 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471127027
• ISBN-13: 978-0471127024
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,403,786 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Electric Circuits, 6th Edition, Dorf and Svoboda, December 12, 2005

By 

Apostle "Mike" (Charlottesville, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Introduction to Electric Circuits (Hardcover)

"Electric Circuits," 6th Edition by Dorf and Svoboda rates as the WORST text I've ever used in my undergraduate or graduate training. While it has many helpful tables and illustrations, the core-material presentation is garbled and not easily understood. This is complicated further by an inexcusable plethora of errors contained throughout the text. Though the authors are obviously knowledgeable in the subject matter, from me they earn a grade of "F" for their ability as writers. When used as an adjunct or self-learning text, where the student's knowledge comes directly from the textbook and without the aid of live lectures, this book is useless.

The following three textbooks cover the SAME material as Dorf and are much better suited as adjunct and self-learning texts. These are presented in the order of recommendation to you: (Monier is by far the best of all)

1. "Electric Circuit Analysis," by Charles J. Monier, 2001, Prentice Hall.

This text is EXCELLENT. As the chapter material and the math progress in complexity (up to LaPlace Transforms) the author inserts "math review chapters," which are especially helpful. The material is presented clearly and in an exact fashion in this book.

2. "Electric Circuits," by Alenander and Sadiku

3. "Introductory Circuit Analysis," by Robert L. Boylestad

Unless you're taking a lecture course directly from the authors or have access to a professor familiar with all the errors and quirks of this text, don't waste your time with it.

Disclaimer: I have no financial or business relationship or interests in any of the texts discussed here.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, could use some proofreading, February 12, 2004

By 

Afonso Arantes (Florianopolis, Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Introduction to Electric Circuits (Hardcover)

It's a mixed book. The exposition is fairly clear with plenty of worked examples and additional problems with answers. This is particularly good for people teaching themselves the material who need lots of practice and can't go to their TA's for help.

The book does use some calculus, but not an unreasonable amount. Some material is easier to understand given the proper mathematical tools and I believe that most of the author's use of calculus in the text is appropriate. There are a couple of exercises that require integration by parts, which I do not consider reasonable. There are also a couple of exercises that result in large, ugly polynomials to be simplified. Perhaps there are ways to avoid these given a cleverer approach than mine. Overall the math isn't excessive, the explanations are clear and there are only a few "What the %*@&!#! are you talking about?!?" moments.

The authors do appear to have been somewhat sloppy about proofreading their text and there are errors not in the official errata sheet. Some are small, like the inductor that mistakenly got assigned a resistor symbol. Some are more serious, like the inductor value that was off by a factor of 10 in one of the excercises. And of course there is the statement on page 8 of the sixth edition that says that the Internet was established in 1995. I guess that this must have been what Al Gore was talking about.

Oh and beware the "Electric Circuit Study Applets." I did finally get them to work, although the process was quite painful. There is no CD included with the book. The reader is required to go to the website, type in a access key, register and so on. The applets are very large java files that take a long time to download. My browser kept dying halfway through the process and it took many tries before the entire process worked. I still haven't managed to get the worked examples pdf file to load properly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a useful introduction, August 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Introduction to Electric Circuits (Hardcover)

This text book was not easy to read or understand. It is NOT a textbook for an introduction to circuit theory. The example problems were simple but the exercises and problems did not ease a student into the understanding of electric circuits. The book tried to give a failed introduction into filters and signals.

It can not be used as a reference book, you can never find what you are looking for.