Textbook Review: Electric Circuits 9th Edition

 

There are worse textbooks out there than this one (for example the textbook I had to use for multivariable calculus) but not many. The problem is that the authors seem to want to skimp on explaining the theory and providing examples and get right to the problems. As a result, you get very little guidance and background on key concepts, a couple rather basic examples, and then a bunch of problems only a few of which the examples provide guidance in solving. If you have an instructor who goes through a lot of examples you can get around some of these deficiencies, but if not you will be lost. In fact, even some of the instructors at my school complain about this book and its lack of guidance.

If you do not find your instructor all that helpful I recommend looking into the MathTutor DVD circuits lessons. Those are DVD sets that do a far better job of explaining the concepts from the course, and more importantly, the instructor goes through many many examples of problems. You can tell that he used a version of this book to select problems from because some of the examples he worked through are number-for-number problems from this book. In all those 6 DVDs cover about 90% of the material in a first-semester circuits class (with the exception of the material on Op-Amps and the complex power material). If you need the book in order to do your homework problems you will not have much of a choice but to get it, but I would not spend a ton of time trying to do any in-depth reading of it because it probably will not help much.