Introduction to Engineering - Thinking Like an Engineer

Reviewed by Mandy Mock, Part time faculty, Portland Community College on 6/24/26

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

Would have liked to see more illustrations for the circuit chapter – series vs parallel resisters for example. Would like some mech E / vector material. More information on technical reports – they are briefly covered in the challenge chapter at the end, but I’d like to see them covered in more depth in the Engineering Communications chapter and a template provided. Also a discussion of Lab Reports would be good.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

From my initial scan, accuracy seems very good.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Most of the material is classic engineering material and so timeless. The material that is specific to Antelope Valley Community College in CA, which this was written for, will change, but isn’t relevant to anyone else anyway. The Matlab pieces could change. Python is overtaking it.

Clarity rating: 5

The text is clearly written and accessible.

Consistency rating: 5

Yes, it’s consistent throughout.

Modularity rating: 4

It would be really nice if the pieces specific to AVC were completely factored out. Other than that, it’s broken down into bite sized chunks pretty well.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The concepts are tied together well. For example, it does a nice job of tying elements together – for example the structured problem solving section talks about really understanding the problems and using the tools of engineering to do so.

Interface rating: 4

It was pretty smooth when I sent through it. I only had trouble in one chapter, where it asked me to log into LibreText to see some of the example problems. Once I did that, it wanted me to enroll in the course. I’m assuming that would be worked out once I deployed this for my own class though.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I didn’t notice anything.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I didn’t see anything out of line.

A nice intro text overall.