What This Book Actually Covers
Essentials Of Electrical And Computer Engineering By Gary R. Johnson, William L. Bigelow, and Michael J. Jones is a textbook designed for introductory engineering courses that span both EE and CPE. It covers circuit analysis, electronics, and digital logic in roughly equal measure across its chapters. The approach is practical rather than theoretical, which means fewer page-count hours spent on Laplace transform proofs and more on actual circuits you can build on a breadboard. The book is organized into three main sections. The first section handles DC and AC circuit analysis with nodal and mesh methods. The second section moves into semiconductor devices and analog circuits including op-amps and filters. The third section covers Boolean algebra, combinational and sequential logic, and finite state machines. Each chapter ends with problems that range from routine calculation to something that requires you to actually simulate the circuit first before guessing at values. It is not the same as Hayt and Kemmerly. This text assumes you have taken freshman calculus and a basic physics course with electricity and magnetism. If you have not, the semiconductor chapters will hit you fast around chapter 7 when they start talking about Fermi levels without much hand-holding.
Getting Essentials Of Electrical And Computer Engineering By
You can find the book through standard academic channels. The publisher is John Wiley and Sons. The current edition is the second edition published in 2019. ISBN is 978-1-119-37577-0. If you are on a budget, the older first edition from 2010 covers nearly the same material. The main differences are expanded coverage of microcontrollers and a new chapter on signal processing that the first edition lacks. Problem sets overlap heavily between editions, so if your professor is using the second edition but you find a first edition copy, you can work through most of the homework without issue. There are instructor solution manuals available through Wiley's educator portal. Students do not get access to those. The end-of-chapter answers in the back of the book are limited to odd-numbered problems only, and they are sometimes just numerical results without derivation, which is fine if you want to check your final answer but useless if you are stuck on the method.
How to Use This Book Without Losing Your Mind
Read the chapter summary first, then jump into the worked examples. Skip the heavy theory sections on the first pass and come back to them only if a problem requires it. The authors put the derivations in boxes and call them optional reading, which is accurate. You will use the results, not the proofs, in almost every problem set. The simulation problems scattered through chapters 4, 8, and 11 are worth doing. They ask you to run the circuit in SPICE and compare measured results against hand calculations. I skipped these at first because I thought they were fluff. That was a mistake. Running the simulation exposed a mistake in my nodal analysis for a circuit with a dependent source that I had been staring at for forty minutes without catching. The simulation showed a node voltage that was negative when my calculation gave positive, and that one number forced me to look again at the direction I assigned to the current through the dependent source. I had it backwards. A hand calculation with four equations would have caught the error eventually, but the simulation made it immediate. Build the circuits from the lab sections. The book includes breadboard layouts with component values. I built the op-amp inverting amplifier from chapter 9 and measured the gain with a function generator and oscilloscope. The theoretical gain was exactly minus ten, but the measured gain was nine point three. The difference came from the op-amp open-loop gain limitation. The textbook mentions this in passing in the op-amp non-ideal characteristics section, but it does not walk you through the math of how finite open-loop gain affects closed-loop accuracy. That is something you have to figure out yourself or ask an instructor about. I derived it from first principles using the feedback equation and got a correction factor that matched my measurement within one percent.
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Common Pitfalls That the Book Does Not Warn You About
The mesh analysis chapter assumes all current sources are either independent or part of a supermesh. It does not cover current sources with parallel resistors well until later in the book, and even then the treatment is thin. I ran into this on a problem involving a Norton equivalent driving a network where the current source and resistor were in parallel inside a mesh loop. The standard mesh method breaks down here because the current through the branch is fixed by the source, not by the mesh current. The workaround is to convert the Norton source to its Thevenin equivalent first, or to write the mesh equation in terms of the known current source value and use a constraint equation. I learned this the hard way during a midterm when I spent twelve minutes trying to force a mesh setup that would not work. The frequency domain analysis in the AC section uses phasors extensively. The book introduces phasor notation cleanly, but it rarely explains why engineers still use it when computational tools can solve time-domain differential equations directly. The answer is that phasors let you see stability margins, resonance peaks, and impedance matching at a glance. A time-domain simulation gives you a waveform. A phasor analysis gives you magnitude and phase relationships that tell you whether a filter will actually pass the signal you care about. Do not skip the phasor chapter because you think simulation will replace it. It will not. Another issue: the logic design section moves from gates to flip-flops to state machines quickly, and the timing analysis portion is sparse. Setup and hold time violations are mentioned in one paragraph near the end of the sequential logic chapter. If you are building synchronous circuits for a FPGA lab, you will need additional reference material. The book gives you the Boolean simplification and state reduction skills, but it does not prepare you for timing closure or metastability issues that show up when you actually implement the design.
What the Book Misses
Power systems are nearly absent. If your program requires a course in power distribution or three-phase analysis, this book will not cover it. Transformers get a section in the AC chapter but only as ideal transformer theory with basic impedance reflection. Real transformer modeling with leakage inductance and core losses is not included. Electromagnetics gets one introductory chapter that covers Maxwell's equations at a conceptual level. Do not expect transmission line analysis or wave propagation beyond a surface mention. Courses that require those topics need a companion text like Sadiku or Cheng. The microcontroller content is dated. The book uses an 8051-based example in the embedded systems section. Most university labs have moved to ARM Cortex-M or AVR architecture. The programming concepts transfer, but the peripheral register descriptions and pinout diagrams will not match modern boards. I worked through the embedded chapter using an Arduino Uno as a reference point and cross-referenced the register-level operations with the Atmel datasheet. It took extra time but the underlying logic of timer configuration and interrupt handling was identical.
Signal processing beyond basic Fourier series is not covered. If your curriculum includes discrete-time signals, z-transforms, or digital filter design, you will need additional material such as Oppenheim and Schafer or Proakis. This book touches on sampling theory in the context of data conversion but does not develop the subject further.
Problems Worth Your Time
Chapter 4 problems 45 through 52 cover dependent source networks and are useful for building intuition about controlled sources in transistor models later. Chapter 8 problems on RLC transient response, particularly the underdamped case, are essential before you move into filter design. Chapter 12 problems on Karnaugh map minimization with don't-care conditions are straightforward but the exam-style questions in the back often trick students by including redundant prime implicants. Work through them carefully. Chapter 15 state machine design problems are where the book is strongest. The finite state machine examples progress from a simple sequence detector to a modulo-N counter, and each builds on the previous one. Do not skip ahead. The lab manual that accompanies the textbook is separate and sold independently. It is worth purchasing if your course includes a lab component. The experiments are well written with pre-lab questions that force you to calculate expected results before you touch any hardware.
Bottom Line
Essentials Of Electrical And Computer Engineering By Johnson, Bigelow, and Jones is a solid first-course text. It is not the most rigorous option available. If you want deeper mathematical treatment, consider Nilsson and Riedel for circuits or Tocci for digital systems. But if your goal is to finish a one-year survey course with practical skills and pass the accompanying lab, this book does the job efficiently. Read actively, simulate when asked, build the circuits, and do not assume the end-of-chapter answers will explain anything beyond the final number.
