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computer engineer solves in the course of completing many of his
or her design projects.

My experience indicates that you can achieve the above goals through the
following work habits that I usually recommend to my own students:

• Read carefully the material from this book that is assigned to you
by your instructor for the upcoming week, and make sure to solve
the suggested preparatory exercises in advance of the weekly lecture.
• Attend the lecture and follow closely the material presented, in
particular the solutions to the more difficult preparatory exercises
and the demonstrations.
• Following the lecture, make a list of questions on the preparatory
material to which you still seek answers, and ask your instructor
for help and clarification on these questions, preferably in the first
30 minutes of your computer lab session.
• Complete the in-class exercises during the computer lab session. If
you have not finished solving all in-class exercises, make sure you
complete them on your own, when the lab is open, or at home if
you own a computer, and certainly before the next class session,
along with the problems designated in the book as homework
problems and assigned to you by your instructor.

In managing this course, I found it helpful for both students and instruc-
tors to require each student to solve all problems in a bound notebook. The
advantage to the student is to have easy access to his or her previous work,
personal notes, and reminders that he or she made as the course pro-
gressed. The advantage to the instructor is to enhance his or her ability to
assess, more easily and readily, an individual student’s progress as the
semester progresses.
This book may be used for self-study by readers with perhaps a little more
mathematical maturity acquired through a second semester of college calcu-
lus. The advanced reader of this book who is familiar with numerical meth-
ods will note that, in some instances, I did not follow the canonical order for
the sequence of presentation of certain algorithms, thus sacrificing some opti-
mality in the structure of some of the elementary programs included. This
was necessitated by the goal I set for this book, which is to introduce both
analytical and computational tools simultaneously.
The sections of this book that are marked with asterisks include material
that I assigned as projects to students with either strong theoretical interest or
more mathematical maturity than a typical second semester freshman stu-
dent. Although incorporated in the text, they can be skipped in a first read-
ing. I hope that, by their inclusion, I will facilitate to the interested reader a
smooth transition to some new mathematical concepts and computational
tools that are of particular interest to electrical engineers.

© 2001 by CRC Press LLC