Linear Circuit Analysis: Time Domain, Phasor, and Laplace Transform Approaches (The Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Its a pity that a few (or the same?) undergrad studends, unhappy (?) with the recommended text for their circuit analysis course (or unhappy with their teacher?), which, by sure, have never seen many more texts on the subject, and possibly don't grasp a lot of the relevant matters, feel confident to (under)rate this book as they do. The authors of this book have a place in the history of circuit analysis: P.-M. Lin has written, jointly with Leon Chua, "Computer-Aided Analysis of Electronic Circuits: Algorithms and Computational Techniques" which is often coined as the "Kama-Sutra of circuit simulation"; R. DeCarlo has written "Linear Systems: a State Variabe Approach with Numerical Implementation". I own copies of both books and they are worth every cent they costed me. The above note doesn't end the accomplishments of the authors: for instance, they are highly regarded researchers in the analog fault diagnosis area, and P.-M. Lin has done important work on Symbolic Network Analysis. Of course, the reputation of the authors doesn't make a good book. But "Linear Circuits...", from DeCarlo and Lin is a very good book. When one of the reviewers of this book says "It took the entire chapter of THIRTY FIVE pages to explain simple relations between voltage, current, and resistance" it omits that, in the same chapter, are introduced the effective or RMS value of a periodic signal, the four linear dependent (controlled) sources, the notion of lumped element, of memoryless element, etc... It suffices to say that in page 35 there is a list of terms and concepts discussed in chapter 1 with about 40 entries. The authors also touch the 'nonlinear world' where they can: saturation in OPAMPS (Ch. 4), comparators with OPAMPS, nonlinear battery charge model (ch. 2), diode rectifiers (ch. 22). They present Modified Nodal Analysis, the 'universal' circuit analysis method used by almost all circuit simulators, although in a starred section (which I wouldn't have done). This is not common in textbooks. There are many practical examples: the DAC with R-2R ladder in ch. 4, the diode rectifier in ch. 22 and chapter 21 on basic filtering, for instance. And I, an old monkey, even have learned something: for instance, I have never used the modified superposition analysis presented in ch. 5. The bridge between circuit models and the underlying physics (electromagnetics) is done in several places (e.g. when inductors are discussed), what promotes the intelectual development of the students by cross-coupling models at two levels of detail. The matters lacking in this book are mostly related with nonlinear circuit analysis (at least with quiescent point and incremental/small-signal analysis) but current circuit texts suffer from this illness (I miss the now out-of-print text from Chua/Desoer/Kuh, "Linear and Nonlinear Circuits"...). The fact that nonlinear circuits are 'overlooked' creates the awkward idea that "nonlinear circuits=electronics" (its in the basic electr

This book is certainly not a list of equations explaining how to and when to use them. It includes a lot of theory and derivation which can seem useless when all you want to do is solve V=IR. But I think one of the objectives of this book is to include the complexity behind the equations simply because there is complicated theory behind linear circuit analysis. That is why at times Decarlo will say, 'I will not go into the derivation, that is for more advanced topics' and of that sort. If you want to learn the subject to the fullest understanding, this book will do a pretty good job. That is why it has been published by Oxford publisher like it has. It didn't make it that far for no reason. I have almost finished summarizing the book on my website which can easily be found by typing in the text name and the author followed by notes in a serach engine. In the end though the most important tool that will help you learn the material is practice of course.