Book Recommended

[Dr Amit K Awasthi]

Please look the following book for possible adoption

[Jacky Hood]

Hello Dr. Awasthi,
Thank you for posting this recommended book. I will send you a message requesting more information about the copyright.
Best regards,
Jacky Hood

[Michael Hsieh]

By reading the preface and the table of content, plus sampling a few pages of each chapter,
It led me to form the following impression.

This one should be a wonderful book for upper division engineering math course, preferably junior year. It should be doable to cover the whole book in high detail in a time frame of 2 semesters or covering some selected topics in high detail in 1 semester. It also seems to be an excellent book for the 1st year PhD students pursuing a solid background in mathematical tools in both the statistical analysis and numerical analysis.

The book treated the materials with rigor and presented the concepts with well thought out sequence. The writing of the book seems to be highly readable. The content has been rich. The depth of the treatment seems to be well tuned.

This book would also serve as an excellent reference for the practicing engineering professionals with tasks heavily involving statistical analysis and numerical analysis. The amount of the theoretical background presented in the book would provide enormous values to the practicing professionals by enabling them to further explore the capabilities of the software tools they have at hand.

Personally speaking, I would love to get hold of the instructor’s manual for this book and do a more thorough reading. I would not hesitate to recommend this book as a required text for a junior year course or the 1st year PhD level course for students that would be pursuing a future career heavily utilizing the knowledge in statistical analysis and numerical analysis. Moreover, those who interested in using this book in their study would also be recommended to use software tools, such as Matlab, Minitab, JMP, etc. to help making the math concepts more visual-friendly.

This book could be overwhelming to students in their sophomore year. The way the book organized the content and presented the materials reminded me the style of the education process I went through in the eastern hemisphere – math is a tool for engineers therefore a book like this one does a wonderful job of describing the intricacies of the tools while providing limited illustration on why such tool has been developed and how they would be more effectively utilized. The audience has been assumed to be either already familiar with the context where the tool would be utilized or studying the targeted problems and the potential solutions in parallel.

A book of this nature could be too heavy a hammer for the lower division engineering students growing up in the environment of western hemisphere, especially, US, where the culture puts more simultaneous emphasis on why a mathematical tool has been developed and how it would be applied to solving the problems at hand. In my humble opinion, lower division students in US would be much better equipped to take on a book like this one after they have had an introductory course using a book such as A First Course in Electrical and Computer Engineering (in freshmen year) and an intermediate level engineering mathematics course (in sophomore year). This is not to imply that this book has been written at a level too high for US lower-division students to use. The key point to be reiterated here is that US students, in general, would appreciate the value of mathematical rigor much more when they also understand the context of the need of such a sophisticated tool as well as the clarified ways of utilizing such tools in the problem solving process in practice. In my personal understanding, students accustomed to the education process in eastern hemisphere tend to have a higher level of patience and tolerance in their learning sequence for understanding the “why” and the “how to” parts of a tool such as engineering mathematics. This cultural difference might have played a significant role in prompting Professor Louis Scharf to develop his book such as A First Book in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

[Jacky Hood]

Michael, thanks for posting this thoughtful review of Engineering Mathematics and thanks for your formal review of A First Course in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Others with experience in Asia and North America, please comment on Michael's cultural observations.

Jacky