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Engineering problem solving with MATLAB
Etter D., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1993. Type: Book (9780132804707)
Date Reviewed: Nov 1 1994

The intended audience for this textbook is first- or second-year engineering students. Etter introduces engineering problem solving through the use of MATLAB. All the examples and exercises are couched in engineering terminology. Each chapter after the first contains at least one major example. The MATLAB codes used in the examples are given on a PC diskette bound into the book.

The material falls into three parts. The first part contains an introduction to major engineering problems solved recently and to some “grand challenge problems” currently under investigation. These grand challenges recur later in the text in brief chapter introductions. Generally, however, they are only distantly connected to the problems solved in the examples in the respective chapters. The second chapter in this part is an introduction to MATLAB, covering its use of arrays and matrices and its plotting capabilities.

Part 2, “Fundamental Engineering Computations,” consists of five chapters, all concentrating on introducing further features of MATLAB and using them in simple examples. The last part is on “Numerical Techniques.” So are some earlier chapters, but the techniques there are treated like concrete mathematical operations. This third part consists of eight chapters. The first three, on “Solution of Systems of Linear Equations,” “Interpolation and Curve Fitting,” and “Polynomial Analysis,” are suggested as a component of a first course together with the two introductory parts of the book. This idea is superficially attractive, as the material is presented as not requiring calculus. Some calculus is implicitly assumed, however, and, in any case, the suggested course is too much MATLAB and not enough engineering and mathematics. The later chapters, from “Numerical Integration” and “Differentiation” through “Control Systems,” clearly will make little sense to the student without a calculus background, and for some topics, an elementary differential equation course, a numerical methods course, or a linear algebra course. Five appendices provide a quick reference guide to MATLAB, introduce MAT-files and the use of MATLAB on MS-DOS and on Macintosh machines, and give solutions to a small selection of the problems posed in the earlier chapters.

Finally, I list some of the places where the insistence on no calculus or other advanced mathematics leads to infelicitous or erroneous comments. Maclaurin series are used in chapter 3 to derive the Euler Maclaurin formula. Though formally correct, this must confuse the uninformed student. In an example on temperature equilibrium in chapter4, an assumption about averaging is used without physical or mathematical justification. When introducing the MATLAB matrix inv function in chapter 6 and in its use later, no mention is made of the fact that this is a numerical operation with potential severe ill-conditioning. It is treated as an exact operation.

When discussing contouring in chapter 7, Etter does not discuss the approximate nature of the process and the possibility of plausible but incorrect contours. The description of cubic splines in chapter 9 gives no understanding of how smooth they are. Doing so is difficult without assuming univariate calculus. The discussion of linear regression in chapter 9 describes the process of deriving the least squares straight line using partial differentiation, but does so without mentioning partial derivatives. It is obtuse. The discussion of numerical differentiation using backward differences in chapter 11 is numerically naive. Worse, it gives plausible results. The discussion of Runge-Kutta methods for solving ordinary differential equations in chapter 12 leaves the impression that they are Taylor series methods.

The advice on computing intermediate solution values for ordinary differential equations is inappropriate, especially for the higher-order solver. Adjustment of the tolerance would be an appropriate approach. The examples used are too easy. They leave the incorrect impression that a graphically accurate solution will always be computed when using the MATLAB ODE codes with the default error tolerances.

Reviewer:  Ian Gladwell Review #: CR117775
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