Engineering With Mathcas: Using Mathcad to Create and Organize your Engineering Calculations
EN-Genius Reviewer: Dennis L Feucht

by Brent Maxfield, Published by Butterworth-Heinemann
ISBN 0-7506-6702-8, hardback, 494 pp, $23.95

This book is in the genre of supplemental material-to-software product documentation, in this case for MathCAD. Although the MathCAD 11 manual that I have does an adequate job of explaining how MathCAD works, MathCAD is a sophisticated enough tool that additional coaching in how best to use it can be helpful. Maxfield’s book is a welcome addition to that literature. He avoids the pitfalls of some books in this genre of merely repeating, in other words, the information that is already in the manual. This book goes well beyond restatement and reveals a surprising number and variety of either undocumented or obscure features that significantly enhance MathCAD use.

The book also clarifies how to regard the various mathematical entities that MathCAD offers. For instance, when should one use indexing of variables instead of functional notation? Because of the nature of computer math, some inherent numerical-methods features require additional coverage. For instance, MathCAD uses range variables to iterate a variable through a range of discrete values.

The presentation is distinctly engineering in orientation. This can be of immense benefit to fellow engineers who do not want to be sidetracked by the unessential intricacies of mathematical completeness and rigor nor by the differing language and style of E&M treatment by physicists. While not every advanced function in the MathCAD list of built-in functions is covered in this book, its range is fairly complete relative to what engineers are likely to use of MathCAD. This includes explanations from plotting to the programming capabilities of the later versions of MathCAD. The examples in the book can often be used as templates for expanding one’s range of MathCAD skills.

MathCAD and Matlab are the leading math programs, with Matlab appearing to have more popularity in academic use and MathCAD more in industry. Perhaps it is because of the lower price per copy that MathCAD has sold far more copies than Matlab, or other competing math programs in its league. (If you count the calculator in Windows as a math program or Excel, then Microsoft once again holds a leading position in the market.) As if MathCAD cannot sell itself, the last of the 25 chapters of the book, titled Conclusion, reminds readers of the benefits of MathCAD. Some are:

• “Units! Mathcad alerts you to when you are using inconsistent units.” (p 479) You can work in both US and SI (metric) systems simultaneously
• Formulas and equations are visible and presented in familiar math notation so that the calculated results appear where they would be expected
• Change an input variable and results are immediately updated (unless you turn off automatic calculation)
• MathCAD programs or parts of them can easily be lifted for reuse in other programs

The author goes on to describe Internet sharing features that I have never used. What is quite useful in the later MathCAD versions is the conversion of MathCAD documents to HTML. They can even be copied into Word documents, though I find the many text boxes created (one per equation) to be annoying.

The book ends with a CD that contains a 120-day evaluation version of MathCAD 13 and MathCAD files corresponding to book content.

Some engineers are stuck on spreadsheet programs for automating their calculations; others try to use SPICE as a kind of system-level computing language. I have made extensive use of MathCAD for years and find that it offers a superior tool for analysis, especially in exploring the results of mathematical derivations for circuits or systems. Maxfield’s book adds to the MathCAD help literature and deserves to be on the bookshelf of any serious MathCAD user -- and also those who might become one.