Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Basic Circuit Analysis, Second Edition

 

As most science/engineering students know, Schaum's guides can vary widely in quality and helpfulness. This is one that, for the most part, is very helpful. It distills the concepts into easily digestible chunks, giving you enough of the theory to understand the concepts without getting bogged down, and many example problems. The first couple of chapters are basically an overview of various concepts, but once you get to chapter three, you will start with the material you will see in your first couple of class sessions of a circuits analysis class. The guide covers both DC and AC circuit analysis as well as power and three-phase circuits.

There are also chapters on PSPICE, which is one of the circuit simulation software programs that you may or may not learn how to use in your classes. In my electrical engineering program, we used Multisim and MATLAB, so the PSPICE chapters were of no use to me. The guide also has a chapter on Transformers which in my program was not covered in circuits analysis and only covered unless someone took Power Systems. So, not everything in the guide may be covered if you are actually getting this because you are taking a class. If, however, you are getting it to teach yourself the topic, need it for work, or just want to brush up, this is very good and much easier to understand than some of the circuits textbooks.