
DC Electrical Circuit Analysis: A Practical Approach
James M. Fiore, Mohawk Valley Community College
Copyright Year: 2020
ISBN 13: 9781654515478
Publisher: dissidents
Language: English
Conditions of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
Reviews
Friore has an excellent introduction, discussing not just the fundamentals of sig. figs., engineering notation, etc., but also critical thinking and the scientific method. The text covers the content of a first-term introductory electrical... read more
Friore has an excellent introduction, discussing not just the fundamentals of sig. figs., engineering notation, etc., but also critical thinking and the scientific method. The text covers the content of a first-term introductory electrical engineering course on DC electronics, hitting on all of the major learning outcomes with the exception of operational amplifiers (and logic circuits, if that's something you're interested in teaching).
This book is accurate, with only a couple errors associated with end-of-chapter exercises. The author and editors have done a thorough job with this text.
Fiore's book is up-to-date, and its content and construction are such that the text will remain relevant for a long while. The author also maintains (frequently updates) several other textbooks in addition to this one--including laboratory manuals for both DC and AC electronics, and one on programming with C and Arduinos--that you can use to complement this textbook.
Fiore's prose is a pleasure to read. It is both fun and informative, and is clear with high information density. The text does a good job of using both words and mathematical expressions to describe important concepts and relationships.
The text is consistent in terms of its organization, terminology, and voice.
Chapters could be reorganized or omitted as needed, and each chapter is split in to sections that can be easily broken-up without much disruption to the reader.
Fiore presents topics in a self-consistent, logical manner, and it is reasonable to organize the flow of a course based off of the text.
The text has a clear interface, with not glaring issues or inconsistencies. The PDF version could use more navigational links beyond the ones from the table of contents to the start of each chapter, but it does include links to sources (ex. to Wikipedia for resistivity values).
Fiore's grammar is clear.
The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive but, largely as a product of its subject, it does not make use examples that include a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds (or, rather, examples that include these at all!). The instructor will need to ensure that they build an inclusive community of learning without relying upon this text to do the heavy lifting.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: Fundamentals
- Chapter 2: Basic Quantities
- Chapter 3: Series Resistive Circuits
- Chapter 4: Parallel Resistive Circuits
- Chapter 5: Series-Parallel Resistive Circuits
- Chapter 6: Analysis Theorems and Techniques
- Chapter 7: Nodal & Mesh Analysis, Dependent Sources
- Chapter 8: Capacitors
- Chapter 9: Inductors
- Chapter 10: Magnetic Circuits and Transformers
Ancillary Material
About the Book
Welcome to DC Electrical Circuit Analysis, an open educational resource (OER). The goal of this text is to introduce the theory and practical application of analysis of DC electrical circuits. It is offered free of charge under a Creative Commons non-commercial, share-alike with attribution license. For your convenience, along with the free pdf and odt files, print copies are available at a very modest charge. Check my web sites for links.
This text is based on the earlier Workbook for DC Electrical Circuits, which it replaces. The original expository text has been greatly expanded and includes many examples along with computer simulations. For the convenience of those who used the Workbook, many of the problem sets are the same, with some re-ordering depending on the chapter.
About the Contributors
Author
James M. Fiore
My name is Jim and I'm the resident dissident, programmer and author. I've been a college professor for many years teaching in the areas of electrical engineering technology, computer programming and the science of sound. I'm also a musician and an endurance athlete. I established dissidents in the late 1980s as a way to offer various software items that I created, figuring that other people might find them useful as well. Some of these have been commercial and some have been freeware. I also write a lot, including published college text books and lab manuals. Recently, the open educational resource movement has gained momentum (no doubt at least partly propelled by the rising costs of college tuition and texts).