Electrical Engineering 101: Everything You Should Have learned in School...But Probably Didn't
by Darren Ashby, Published by Newnes-Elsevier
ISBN: 0-7506-7812-7, , trade paperback with CD, 332 pp, $39.95
EN-Genius Reviewer: Dennis L. Feucht

In this book the author, an engineering manager, attempts to reduce to a simpler explanation various basic aspects of electronic circuits. It is written in a chatty, informal style and is intended to fill in what is missing in a formal college engineering education. Drawing on stories from his own experience as an engineer he illustrates how basic principles such as Ohm's Law and Thévenin's (but not Norton's!) theorem can get you a long way in the business. He emphasizes the importance of not neglecting units, and touches on other nuances of artificiality that are likely to creep into academic treatments of the electronics engineering art. He spends some time in the book discussing passive circuits, op amps, discrete logic circuits, simple motor drives, power supplies, tools, troubleshooting, engineering department psychology, and human relations. The emphasis is upon the value of intuitive understanding. He goes into more detail than I am presenting here, but not much more.

I am disappointed by this book in that if this is what engineering graduates do not know, then technology is going to grind to a halt. This book is optimal, I would say, for high-school students or young technicians interested in electronics. Yet even then, in an attempt to simplify basic concepts, oversimplification occurs and some of it is inaccurate and could actually lead a reader away from a better understanding. For instance, in several places inductive or capacitive reactance is considered "resistance at a given frequency." With this in mind, it will be difficult to understand why the change in wire resistance with frequency due to the skin effect is any different. A force-voltage electrical-mechanical analog is given, though force and current, both being through (instead of across) quantities correspond more intuitively and lead to simpler motion-control system models in most cases (acoustic systems being an exception). The given motor model (p. 161) is incorrect in that the electrical-mechanical conversion power corresponds to the power of the induced-voltage source, series self-inductance not being a contributor. A step motor is not a "type of dc motor" (p. 170). Other inaccuracies appear throughout the book, leading me to believe that the author has not mastered the material he is attempting to simplify. I like the author's basic desire to make everything as simple as possible, but (following Einstein's well-worn dictum) it should not be made simpler than that.

If this book is approached by readers looking for someone to kibitz lightly on his engineering experience with them, then it can fill this bill. The author is enthralled with electronics but hasn't plunged deeply enough into the subject to be attempting what this book claims to offer. I couldn't really recommend it for anyone attempting to salvage their inability to gain a clear and simple understanding of basic electronics.

Editor's Note: Many engineers get relatively lax about the use of units during their careers. But, it is fundamental in an engineering textbook that units clearly follow the standards of the recognized authority in the country of publication -- in this case the IEEE. The misuse of units throughout this text is particularly heinous because of the audience that it is attempting to address; it lies at the hands of the editor that Newnes employed for the book; these errors should never have been allowed to make it to a printing press. -PJM