Customer Reviews

Linear Circuit Analysis: Time Domain, Phasor, and Laplace Transform Approaches (Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

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Its a pity that a few (or the same?) undergrad studends, unhappy (?) with the recommended text for their circuit analysis course (or unhappy with their teacher?), which, by sure, have never seen many more texts on the subject, and possibly don't grasp a lot of the relevant matters, feel confident to (under)rate this book as they do.

The authors of this book have a place in the history of circuit analysis: P.-M. Lin has written, jointly with Leon Chua, "Computer-Aided Analysis of Electronic Circuits: Algorithms and Computational Techniques" which is often coined as the "Kama-Sutra of circuit simulation"; R. DeCarlo has written "Linear Systems: a State Variabe Approach with Numerical Implementation". I own copies of both books and they are worth every cent they costed me.

The above note doesn't end the accomplishments of the authors: for instance, they are highly regarded researchers in the analog fault diagnosis area, and P.-M. Lin has done important work on Symbolic Network Analysis.

Of course, the reputation of the authors doesn't make a good book. But "Linear Circuits...", from DeCarlo and Lin is a very good book. When one of the reviewers of this book says "It took the entire chapter of THIRTY FIVE pages to explain simple relations between voltage, current, and resistance" it omits that, in the same chapter, are introduced the effective or RMS value of a periodic signal, the four linear dependent (controlled) sources, the notion of lumped element, of memoryless element, etc... It suffices to say that in page 35 there is a list of terms and concepts discussed in chapter 1 with about 40 entries.

The authors also touch the 'nonlinear world' where they can: saturation in OPAMPS (Ch. 4), comparators with OPAMPS, nonlinear battery charge model (ch. 2), diode rectifiers (ch. 22).

They present Modified Nodal Analysis, the 'universal' circuit analysis method used by almost all circuit simulators, although in a starred section (which I wouldn't have done). This is not common in textbooks.

There are many practical examples: the DAC with R-2R ladder in ch. 4, the diode rectifier in ch. 22 and chapter 21 on basic filtering, for instance.

And I, an old monkey, even have learned something: for instance, I have never used the modified superposition analysis presented in ch. 5.

The bridge between circuit models and the underlying physics (electromagnetics) is done in several places (e.g. when inductors are discussed), what promotes the intelectual development of the students by cross-coupling models at two levels of detail.

The matters lacking in this book are mostly related with nonlinear circuit analysis (at least with quiescent point and incremental/small-signal analysis) but current circuit texts suffer from this illness (I miss the now out-of-print text from Chua/Desoer/Kuh, "Linear and Nonlinear Circuits"...). The fact that nonlinear circuits are 'overlooked' creates the awkward idea that "nonlinear circuits=electronics" (its in the basic electronics courses that nonlinearity is suddenly presented), and prevents the students of ever seeing a sistematic (basic) treatment of nonlinear circuits and devices. It also creates the idea that standard electronic circuits are a kind of 'miracles' and their analysis is done with magic tricks.

A well chosen bibliography would be welcome in the text.

Enough said. Overall, this is my preferred circuit analysis textbook in print. It goes beyond 'circuits as cultural animation', presents a good blend of practical and theoretical issues and well chosen examples. It clearly is not suitable for unmotivated and 'weak' students, as the matters are not presented as recipes or in a 'canned' manner.

I have used this book for the last 2 semesters, and I have to say, this is one of the worst books for explaining the topics. DeCarlo himself, whom I have for a professor, doesn't even use half of the problems in the book, and the only reason I know anything is from the class, I would recommend not buying this to learn circuts on your own since it does not do that.

The examples in the book were heavy with errors, the same for the instructors solution guide. the text spreads the essential information throughout the authors prose, without a thought as to how the student is going to extract same when the time comes to work out the assigned problems. The absence of any solutions in the back of the text essentially prevents any motivated student from working out problems on his or her own. The net effect is to give a student tne impression that the correct techniques do not work.

Although this book does introduce certain basic topics in Circuits, in my opinion the examples are very easy to perform and the chapter problems introduce questions that cannot be solved by simply reading the text. The solutions guide is non-existant and there aren't any solutions in the back of the book, so a non highly motivated student will have an extreamly difficult time solving these problems on his own. Unless he gets help from an instructor, tutor, etc., he will not know if he is solving the problem correctly. In my opinion this book leaves a lot of holes in the learning process needed for linear circuit analysis and should not be used on its own.

The text does a poor job of explaining concepts and is of little help in doing most of the homework problems. Expect to put a great deal of work into understanding chapters that are largely an uncoordinated jumble of defintions, equations, and examples. The book multiplies the difficulty of learning circuit concepts.

i used this book in my linear circuit analysis class at purdue, and it has been anything but a pleasurable experience. the text is somewhat confusing, providing little relevant information or examples which would allow anyone to complete the problems at the end of each chapter. the example problems in the book are too simple, and most people will be surprised at the complexity of some of the homework problems. answers are provided for only a select few of the homework problems, most being only partial answers at that. as a result, it is very difficult to apply anything you've learned from the chapter, or even to know if you're applying anything correctly. i would not suggest this book to anyone trying to learn the subject, it would probably only discourage you. my advice: get another book, or a tutor.

This book is less than spectacular in explaining linear circuits. The examples bear almost no resemblence to the homework problems prospective ME students (yes MECHANICAL engineering, not electrical) are forced to do. For instance, no Thevenin equivalence problems in the text refer to op-amp circuits with multiple dependent and independent sources. Attempting to figure out these concepts on one's own leads to frustration. Please talk to R.C. Hibbeler about writing textbooks, and get back to teaching 208 to those helpless EEs.

Anyone who has given this book a good review clearly has not used it to learn the material for the first time. I warn you Professor Decarlo does not like his own book, nor does he use most of the problems and examples in this book when teaching. If you do decide to purchase this book find yourself the errata, I have a copy its three pages long and counting, some of the given answers to problems in the back are wrong. There is nothing like learning the material for the first time and thinking your doing a problem wrong only later to find out the given answers were incorrect, or the circuit is impossible to solve using the material taught in that chapter. Also after reading a chapter and attempting the problems at the end you may wonder if you skipped a section because the 3 examples covered in the chapter will not include floating sources, dependent sources, and many other techniques that are needed to solve the overly complex problems at the end of the chapter. Pair that with only having a few answers given, and most of those being wrong, and you will have no way of testing your knowledge. However if you want a really heavy paperweight, or have a desk that's not quite cluttered enough, then I recommend this book.

If an "old monkey" finds this book as a good reference. Students don't think so, as a student in purdue this book was a required, however, professors who taught this subject made their best to extract the material and present it in a much more digestible manner. Look for another book (Alexander's book) or any other book is better then this.

The tedious repititions and the incomprehensible garrulousness makes this book what it is. It took the entire chapter of THIRTY FIVE pages to explain simple relations between voltage, current, and resistance.

The book is simply a random cacophony of words and diagrams. It is incoherrent with absolutely no order and random pieces of information are spread throughout its entirety of 1008 pages. The information you need for problems of the first chapter aren't covered until chapter two, several examples hardly relate to what's going on in the chapter.

You'd be better off learning the things covered in this course...