Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, 4th Edition

 

This is a great resource, but you need to be clear on what you are getting. It is not going to teach you any material. That you are going to get from class or textbooks, or both. It is simply a book that will give you all the formulas in one place, in a much more compact form than any textbook will give you. You do not have to weave through pages of proofs, explanations, or examples to get to the end result. It covers things from the very simple to the very advanced. Realistically it is impossible to recall every formula that you come across in math and science classes. And, a lot of times people do not keep their textbooks, but you never know when you are going to have to look up a formula at some point down the road that you know exists, but cannot remember all the details of.

When I was in upper-level engineering classes, the professors tended to keep the math relatively basic for many exam questions, but there were some homework questions and class examples that got pretty detailed, and a lot of times they would just say you can solve this using ________ equation/formula and just assume we remember it. Now yes in this day and age you can find almost anything on the internet, but for those of us who prefer books, and writing out homework by hand, this is a great resource. And if you happen to have a class that gives totally open book/note exams, it is something that could come in handy.

Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Advanced Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists

 

This is not really a book that is tied to any one specific course like the other Schaum's outlines are. This is meant to be more like a reference where you can go to look up concepts that you may have forgotten. It is like a condensed textbook that has the key things that you need to know but does not go into a lot of detail about the theory and do a bunch of proofs as a textbook will. Let's face it, we all forget things from class after a while, especially things that we do not use on a regular basis. Most people will be able to remember how to take simple derivatives or integrals, but far fewer people are going to remember how to set up a triple integral or do Laplace Transforms off the top of their heads after they get done with the classes where they have to use them. That is where this will come in handy.

I think the best way to use any of the Schaum's outlines is to use them in conjunction with learning the concepts in class (because they give you far more examples worked out than your book ever will) or as a reference guide once a class is over. At that point, you can use it as a substitute for your textbook because you will not be as likely to need all the detail and rigor of a full-blown textbook by then. It is not something that is going to be useful to teach yourself the concepts from initially. That is because of the lack of detail and the fact that some of the outlines are edited badly and can contain errors. Once you understand the material the errors and typos can be easy to spot, but when you are first learning that is not always the case. I have only glanced through this particular outline so far, so I am not sure how many errors (if any) are in this one. I know some of the outlines have more errors than others, but just be aware if something does not look right when you are working through a problem, it may not be that you don't know what you are doing.

Study Aid Review: Schaum's 3,000 Solved Problems in Physics (Schaum's Outlines) 1st Edition

 

This is one of the Schaum's guides that is really just a problems repository. It does not have much in the way of explanatory material designed to teach you the subject. It is meant to be used in conjunction with a textbook so you can get the explanation of the subject from the book and then come to this for problems. One very helpful thing is that it classifies the problems into categories. Some problems are meant to be very basic examples, much like you will see in the chapter text that are pretty easy and only take one or two steps to solve. Then the book will give homework problems that are divided into problems for everyone (basically problems you would see in algebra-based physics) and calculus-based homework problems. It also suggests problems to select for exams (easy, hard, or calculus-based) for each chapter and to use for a final exam.

My one issue with the book is that there are not many of what I refer to as "compound problems". By that, I mean problems that have 6-7 steps that you have to solve, and you generally use the solution to one step to solve for one of the other steps and so on. In many calculus-based physics classes, calculus is used to derive the formulas, but on the exams, you just use algebra to solve compound problems. If I remember correctly, between the 8 exams I had in two semesters of calculus-based physics, we only had two or three problems that required using calculus in the exams. Obviously, this can vary from teacher to teacher, but because the problems that use calculus take so long to solve, on exams many teachers use problems that have multiple parts but you just use algebra to solve the problems. So, if you have a teacher who does that, this is likely to be more helpful to you on homework problems (where you generally will have to use calculus more) but may not be as helpful mimicking your exam problems. So, with those provisos, I definitely think it is one of the more helpful supplements out there and does give a good breakdown of the solutions so you actually learn how to solve the problems.

Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Engineering Mechanics: Statics (Schaum's Outlines) 6th Edition

 

Chances are, most people who have taken upper-level science and engineering classes are familiar with Schaum's outlines, and the different outlines range in quality. This one is definitely on the lower-quality end of the spectrum. As others have noted, there are a lot of errors in the solutions that are worked out, and many problems just give answers without any solutions which, based on the number of errors in the worked-out solutions, you cannot have a high degree of confidence in. The explanatory material is pretty light in this outline and is really not much easier to follow (and in some cases not even as easy to follow) as the explanatory materials in the textbook (at least the textbook I had to use).

It can be used as a supplement, but just be aware that you may have to put in a lot more effort to get what you need out of it than you will have to put into the use of other outlines. If you do have a good teacher and can follow the textbook fairly well, then you can probably just skip this, or find a better supplement.

Study Aid Review: Schaum's Outline of Electric Circuits, Fifth Edition

 

This is a good supplement that will cover much of the material that you will be exposed to in the first year of circuits analysis, which is usually split into two semesters. This does have some explanatory material like what you will see in the chapter text of a textbook, and sometimes it lays things out more clearly than the book does (depending on which textbook your school uses; some are better than others). On the whole, I would say that the Schaum's Outline of Basic Circuit Analysis has better explanatory material than this guide does, but this one tends to have more challenging problems.

My one big issue with this is that it branches out too much into material that is not covered just in circuits and gets into some of the higher-level concepts that you would get in a class on signals, electronics, electric and magnetic fields, and so forth. I think this outline could have focused more on the material that is covered in the vast majority of the first-year curriculums (because some of that is very light), and then done a chapter or two on the more advanced concepts to give a roadmap to the topics that are covered in other classes and how they tie into the material of in the introductory circuits classes. That said, it does have a lot of example problems that will definitely help you with your homework, and it gives good explanations for the material it does cover.