Book Organization and Approach

This on-line textbook serves as an introduction to electrical engineering concepts and applications for non-electrical & computer engineering majors.  This text was written to accompany the course ECE361 – Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This is a required course for undergraduate mechanical, biomedical, and industrial engineering majors, and students from computer science, physics, art, and other academic majors have also taken the course.  The course provides students with vocabulary and electrical/electronics analysis and design concepts in order to help them work in multidisciplinary teams designing engineered systems in their professional  careers.  The course also provides a practical introduction to electronics that should enable students to experiment with electronics in their own right as well as provide a foundation for further study in electronics.

This book is organized differently from most textbooks written for the Intro-to-EE-for-non-EE-majors course. Most texts focus substantial time on the theory and analysis of linear circuits, i.e., circuits comprised of components such as voltage and current sources, resistors, capacitors and inductors. The treatment typically evolves from mathematical analysis starting with algebra, then moving to matrices (solving systems of linear algebraic equations), then moving on to setting up and solving first and second order differential equations. Standard treatment then moves on to the Laplace transform as a way to study the frequency behavior of linear systems. The study of electronic devices, such as diodes and transistors comes next, followed by digital circuits and, in some cases, the behavior of motors. Intro-to-EE-courses-for-non-EE’s based on such texts rarely have a lab component.

In my own experience learning electronics, both as an EE student several decades ago, and when self-teaching in areas where I needed to learn something new, I have found that I rely on a combination of theory and hands-on practice to understand new concepts. I need the theory to form some kind of concept in my head. And I need the hands-on  practice to make sense of the theory and test and validate my understanding. Some of my best, most satisfying learning has taken place when I was able to study some theory, work through pencil-and-paper analysis, and then build and test a working system. It is in this spirit that I have written this book. Theoretical concepts are introduced, pencil and paper problems are assigned, and lab experiments are conducted. The lab experiments involve circuits  that do things: glow and blink lights in different colors, spin motors, sense room variables such as light level and temperature, etc… These experiments increase in complexity as different components are interconnected together, culminating in a working system that pulls it together. 

The course concept map shown below serves as a kind of roadmap for this text. Coverage spans the physical basis for electrical engineering (ie, charges and electric potential, left-most block), circuit laws, devices, models, and analysis tools (middle blocks) and the interconnection of multiple devices to implement a working system (right-most block, captioned “System pipeline”).  The book chapters do not strictly follow the left-to-right sequence shown in the concept map. This allows each chapter to introduce ideas and assign interesting hands-on lab assignments in a flexible way. To help readers move through the text, this concept map is reproduced at the beginning of each chapter to answer the question, “Where am I?” Each chapter also begins with a brief statement answering: “what key question does this chapter help me answer?”, “How does the theory connect to the lab?” and “Where does this material show up in systems?”