Essential Foundations
Essential Foundations in Engineering Series is a wishful collection of ebooks in core engineering courses imparting basic information. Each one will address a core area associated with its name and provide an excellent substitute for standard texts on the topic. The initial set of books by the author will target the common core courses from mechanical, aerospace, or civil engineering. It will include mechanics (statics and dynamics), strength of materials, and fluid mechanics. 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 definitely other textbooks. The topics include those covered in any standard course at any university. These ebooks will be next generation textbooks 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 ebook 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, standard, 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 lectures in a regular classroom. The software used is readily available for students. MATLAB is available to students freely through institutional license. If MATLAB is unavailable then Octave, a free MATLAB like software can be downloaded under GNU license. The ebook series has no requirement for prior knowledge of software. Exposure to prerequisite mathematics and science courses in a standard engineering curriculum will be necessary. The book incorporates computational code as required and encourages students to use and extend the code at all times. MATLAB/Octave is used for problem solving, as 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 being encouraged to use MATLAB on their own but that defeats the purpose of the book. The coverage is the same as in any standard textbook on the subject.
All books are 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 extends to most of the courses. This is demonstrated in this course taught by the author at 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 a 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 ebooks are meant to communicate the essential knowledge referred to 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 illustrate important topics in a simple and unified manner and get to the applications faster. 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 ebooks 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
All of the above requires investment of more time than you have. With Essential Foundations in Engineering you get a very concise version. The guarantee that you will learn will depend 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
was released in Jan 2020
This book:
Essential Fluids With MATLAB and Octave - Part 1 (Theory)
has release date Jan 2024
The follow up book
Essential Fluids With MATLAB and Octave - Part 2 (Application)
Is targeted for Jan 2026
The last one
Essential Dynamics with MATLAB and Octave
Is planned for Jan 2028
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