Essential Foundations in Engineering Series in is a planned wishful collection of e-books in core engineering courses, Each one will address a core area contained in its name and provide an excellent substitute for standard texts on the topic. The initial set of books will target the common core courses from mechanical, aerospace, or civil engineering, primarily with beginning mechanics, strength of materials, and fluid mechanics. They are also useful as service courses for the remaining engineering programs. One singular characteristic of these introductory books is the presentation being to the point, relevant, and sufficient. The student can always follow up, if necessary, at online resources like “Wikipedia” or “Scholarpedia”, “The Engineering Toolbox”, “eFunda”, other websites, and other books. The topics include those covered in any standard course at any university. These e-books will be next generation textbook with emphasis on design thinking woven throughout the book and integrated from the beginning with computation. This will allow instructors to challenge their students with advanced problem solving using open-ended design exercises and encourage visual examination of the solution. It allows students to develop a new, and much required skill set that is easily extensible and professionally valuable.
Each e-book will have more than just formulas. The formulas themselves are developed rigorously through clear examples and graphics. In addition there is MATLAB/Octave code to perform regular, complex, and involved calculations based on these formulas. The code integrates symbolic, numerical, graphical and textual programming as appropriate. These computational exercises can be hands-on and part of lecture in a regular classroom. The software used is readily available for personal laptops. The e-book series has no requirement for prior knowledge of software. Exposure to basic mathematics courses in a standard engineering curriculum will be necessary. The books teaches and incorporates computational code as required and encourages students to use and extend the code at all times. MATLAB/Octave is used an an efficient and high powered calculator to solve very specific problems rather than a software package that requires training and general exposure. The skill learned here can be easily deployed in other courses. The book can be used independently of the MATLAB/Octave content, but there are far more elegant textbooks on the subject that will be more useful and less distracting. The book can still be used as a text formally ignoring the MATLAB/Octave content with students can be encouraged to use MATLAB on their own. The coverage is the same as in any standard textbook on the subject.
This book is illustration driven. The calculations are performed both step by step and also use software. Initially you might find this tedious, however sustained use in a short period of time will likely change your mind. The book encourages you to streamline your coding through copy, extend, and reuse. The earlier code you meet are commented in greater detail to guide your understanding. Consider this simple fact: You need only about 250 MATLAB commands to cover the typical mechanical engineering curriculum - and this includes most of the courses. This is demonstrated in this course taught by the author: https://sites.google.com/site/mece689specialtopics/home
Having taught over the last 35 years in a department of mechanical engineering the author realizes that both teaching and learning change with each generation. Each generation appears to have different outlook on learning, the effort that they are willing to invest, their ability to comprehend, their motivation to think, and very important today, their ability to handle distractions. Of course other educators may have a very different experience, which also depends on the institution, its branding, and the nature of students it attracts.
These e-books are meant to communicate the essential knowledge referred in their titles. They may also serve as a reference for prior learning that has been forgotten. Unlike standard text books that are packed with material, the aim here is to to illustrate important topics in a simple and unified manner and get to the applications faster. Topics requiring more detailed knowledge are also available in the books.
Finally, it matters if the students can apply what they learn consistently, if they remember the concepts, if they recollect the procedure which may have been applied consistently some time ago. For this reason, the e-books contemplated in this series should be a big help.
One important question still remains: Do we really need another book in these core courses?
There are a lot of excellent books on core courses in engineering. Today, they are also accompanied by enormous publisher support. They
Have excellent color illustrations
Detailed explanation of topics - more details with new edition
Lots of supplementary materials to enable teaching and learning
Supporting websites with more materials that appear with clicks
More pages with each edition
More expensive with each edition
Increased cost of sustaining these features
With Essential Foundations in Engineering you get a very concise version. The guarantee that you will learn will depends on you and not on any of these books, including the one being touted here. The primary motivation for this book is to provide a challenging, productive, skilled, and happy assimilation of your academic and learning experience in engineering problem solving.
The first book in this series is :
Essential Mechanics - Statics and Strength of Materials with MATLAB and Octave
Currently two others are planned by the author to appear within the next five years.
Essential Fluid Mechanics -Fluid Mechanics with MATLAB and Octave
Essential Dynamics - Dynamics and Vibrations with MATLAB and Octave
The remaining is left for others to take the lead..