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Introduction

This book is mostly based on a series of notes for a primer course in electrical
and computer engineering that I taught at the City College of New York
School of Engineering. Each week, the class met for an hour of lecture and a
three-hour computer laboratory session where students were divided into
small groups of 12 to 15 students each. The students met in an informal learn-
ing community setting, a computer laboratory, where each student had the
exclusive use of a PC. The small size of the groups permitted a great deal of
individualized instruction, which was a key ingredient to cater successfully
to the needs of students with heterogeneous high school backgrounds.
A student usually takes this course in the second semester of his or her
freshman year. Typically, the student would have completed one semester of
college calculus, and would be enrolled in the second course of the college
calculus sequence and in the first course of the physics sequence for students
in the physical sciences and engineering.
My purpose in developing this book is to help bring the beginner engineer-
ing student’s analytical and computational skills to a level of competency
that would permit him or her to participate, enjoy, and succeed in subsequent
electrical and computer engineering courses. My experience indicates that
the lack of mastery of fundamental quantitative tools is the main impediment
to a student’s progress in engineering studies.
The specific goals of this book are

1. To make you more comfortable applying the mathematics and
physics that you learned in high school or in college courses,
through interactive activities.
2. To introduce you, through examples, to many new practical tools
of mathematics, including discrete variables material that are
essential to your success in future electrical engineering courses.
3. To instruct you in the use of a powerful computer program,
®
MATLAB *, which was designed to be simultaneously user-
friendly and powerful in tackling efficiently the most demanding
problems of engineering and sciences.
4. To give you, through the applications and examples covered,
glimpses of some of the fascinating problems that an electrical or

®
* MATLAB is a registered trademark of the MathWorks, Inc., 3 Apple Hill Drive, Natick, MA,
01760-2098, USA. Tel: 508-647-7000, Fax: 508-647-7101, e-mail: info@mathworks.com, Web:
www.mathworks.com.

© 2001 by CRC Press LLC