Customer Reviews

Principles and Applications of Electrical Engineering

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

Have pity on me..... I did not read the reviews on this book before I bought it because I thought "Hey, this is the book that Duke University says that I need. I'll just order it through an Amazon reseller and save money." Point, click. Point click. Little did I know that the publisher changed to the "REVISED Fourth Edition" right before the semester started, and for good reason.

This book's errors are too numerous to have been an accident. Someone must have used a random number generator for the answers in the back of the book. An alternating logic switch must have been used on the sample problems ("For every 3rd sample problem, we'll change the sign of the leading term to keep them guessing....." or something along those lines).

I hate the fact that I had to shell out another $120 to get the REVISED Fourth Edition and that I now have this expensive doorstop sitting here, but I just cannot sell this dead tree bark to anyone and live with myself, afterwards. I hope some heads rolled at McGraw Hill for publishing this ....

Anyway, the moral of the story is: READ THE REVIEWS! WE ARE TRYING TO WARN YOU, ....!

I'm not sure who is supposed to benefit from the use of this textbook. I am a 4.0 student at a leading university. I bust my butt and work hard to understand material and ask questions of professors, research on the web, and spend as many hours outside class as needed in order to understand the material introduced by the textbooks used in my courses.

This book is, without a doubt, the least helpful, most error-ridden, topic brushing, irrelevent-example-giving, important-step-skipping book I have EVER had the misfortune to use. If you have a professor who uses this book for their course, DON'T TAKE THAT CLASS. Find another school or professor or major. Really.

Over the course of this past semester, for every hour I've spent reading this textbook I estimate that I've had to spend three hours researching the web or referencing other EE books. I am NOT KIDDING. From the simplest, most basic concepts (KCL, KVL and how to set up node and mesh equations using the "passive element" convention) to the most modest 2nd order circuits (frequency response of an RLC bandpass circuit), this book cannot seem to explain ANYTHING clearly, completely, and without glossing over concepts that may be *gasp* NEW to students whose major is NOT EE! There isn't a single topic covered by this book that I haven't had to do further research on in order to fully grasp. Unbelievable.

If this review seems to be negative or overly critical, that's exactly how it's intended. Maybe others can get a sense of the frustration they'll experience while trying to learn from this book. With any luck, they'll be able to avoid the book, the frustration, and the (literally) dozens of nonproductive hours of ancillary research required because the author of seems to be so out of touch with the needs of his intended audience.

a few errors is understandable but this is just sorry... not only are answers in the back of the book wrong but there are errors within example problems too and errors to the answers of those example problems. we have to waste about 10 mins every class period to make corrections to the book. plus you never know if you are doing something correctly cause there is nothing to check your work with.

I needed this book for one of my courses. I can't believe I paid 130$ for this atrocious book. There are tons of numerical and typing errors. You couldn't understand anything because there were spelling mistakes in every sentence. I also disliked the explanations in the book. They don't help you out at all when it was time to do the problems. Even the questions were filled with errors such as missing symbols, wrong numerical values (and the list goes on). My prof gave me an errata sheet that had the corrections. It was 25 pages long! I want this Rizzoni guy to give me my money back, not to mention an apology for wasting my time. BUYER BEWARE

If you can stomach the shameless self-promotion of his electric speed racer and other ridiculous examples (like the Ford Escape hybrid), you'll absolutely choke on the outrageous number of errors that fill this book. And I'm not talking little typos, this thing has diagrams that are completely wrong, and on and on. If you fail your first course in EE, maybe you and the other 1000s of victims could file a class action lawsuit against Rizzoni and McGraw Hill for selling a faulty product. Sure, it won't kill you like cigarettes, but you'll wish you were dead after suffering through this. Don't let the 1-star rating fool you; Amazon doesn't allow a zero rating, but they should.

We have only made it through some of chapter three, and in the dozen problems that we've had, we have found nearly half a dozen errors. Misprinted subscripts on prob. 3.17, random arrows(in the middle of a circuit on 3.3), lack of needed values (3.1--it's 1 Ohm), and then the outright wrong(3.17 asks for the resistance through a nonexistant 40-Ohm resistor when there is nothing above 3 Ohms). Don't buy the book; the errors are still ridiculous. And then the author plugs himself in manyof the pictures in the first chapter ("courtesy of Giorgio Rizzoni"). I reccomend buying the older edition and borrowing someone else's if you need the 5th edition problems. This book was a waste of money.

There is a great deal of errors in this textbook. The list of errors for the 3rd edition is about 3-4 pages long. I dont know how many pages is for this book cause the company or the author didnt even post the corrections. My professor eventually had to give out the answers since we couldnt depend on the answers on the back of the book.
The text frequently refers to a cd. A CD never came with the book. How can you sell a version of the textbook without a cd if you frequently refer to it.
How can I learn from a textbook with mistakes?

I am currently in a engineering circuits class that requires this book. The 5th edition has a letter attached for the first page stating the company's commitment to accuracy. The letter then describes 7 steps taken to verify the content and accuracy.

I have just started and chapter 2 is loaded with errors in the example and homework problems.

I wish I could get my money back or a manual filled with corrections. I can not even do the homework or read the chapters on my own with confidence because there is no telling when I am wrong or the book is.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who has struggled with this textbook. It made simple concepts seem more difficult than those in my most advanced classes (I'm about to graduate). If you have to use this textbook for a class, I recommend getting another book out of the library to learn the concepts. Better yet, photocopy the problems you need from a friend and avoid this book all together.

The author doesn't clarify his points and leaves to many questions unanswered. This book often says things like "The value of flux in the core will be given by this equation" without specifying where this came from. He will also combine multiple equations and simply allow the definition of variables to change.