Engineering Systems

Engineering Systems: An Introduction introduces students to the field of engineering and engineering problem-solving while providing important foundation skills in MATLAB. Presenting a broad view of actual engineering practice, this book describes the general skills and training engineers of any discipline need to serve society.

Engineering Systems: An Introduction focuses on establishing the basic mindset and skill set that beginning engineering students need as a foundation for success, both in school and as professionals. The author presents a simple model of how the human mind stores, organizes, and retrieves information, and uses this as background for introducing a variety of foundation skills for engineering students, including:
* study skills and techniques for learning new material,
* problem-solving using a "divide-and-conquer" approach,
* ways of describing systems and understanding why engineers organize systems as they do.

The author also emphasizes the importance of quantitative models in the design process, and introduces students to the concepts of objectives and constraints, and ways of predicting if a design will be acceptable before it is built. The final chapter of the book presents a simple yet detailed description of how current--and future--computing systems represent and process information, and of the role that information processing technology plays in engineering systems.

Problem-solving is reinforced through extensive use of MATLAB throughout the text, providing students the opportunity to learn this important engineer analysis and visualization tool.

Course Hierarchy:

Offered freshman year and may be offered in any engineering department at the freshman or sophomore level. Course is most often called Intro to Engineering.

Check Mechanical, Electrical, Computer, Civil, and Industrial for courses as well as General or other similarly named departments that offer freshman and sophomore level service courses for their School of Engineering. This book does NOT fit the more advanced Engineering Systems course in Industrial Engineering.