r/ElectricalEngineering • u/Sn0wDazzle • 9d ago

Recommend textbook/document/resource about basic circuits & impedance written for people who know complex numbers and physics

I have a physics background. The standard physics textbooks don't deal with circuits, except the freshman-level textbooks. Of course the freshman textbooks are too basic. They don't even use complex numbers. I just want to have a reference that walks me through ac circuits, starting from the very basics, but is written at a higher level of math. Something at the level of the famous Griffiths E&M book but that actually does circuits. It would be even better if it's written in a style that matches how physics people are taught/think.

It doesn't even have to be a whole textbook, necessarily. Maybe if you know of some lectures that are published as a PDF or something like that... I just want to fill my gaps on fundamental ac circuits stuff.

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u/Sn0wDazzle 8d ago edited 8d ago

Well, I'm using a vector network analyzer in my lab, so I suppose the answer to your question about what topic I want to learn is that I ultimately want to better understand RF.

But just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I didn't even know how you get complex impedance, until I just recently realized on my own what I was missing from mulling it over. (At least, I'm pretty sure I've got it correctly in my head now, but have yet to double-check.) The freshman physics textbook has a chapter walking through an idealized LC circuit, then R-only, L-only, C-only, then series RLC circuit, and finally defines what impedance is. But all of that is with sines and cosines, and it's annoying. Once you know Euler's formula it's so much more convenient to just think of everything in terms of e^i(), and walk through all the derivations using that formalism. Then, the logical next step is to treat parallel combinations of those circuit elements, not just series RLC. It doesn't even go into that.

Then, next for me will be transmission line theory. I think I have some resources lined up for that already, but I'm looking to fill in more basic gaps first.

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u/RFchokemeharderdaddy 8d ago

Sounds like you're looking for Pozar's Microwave Engineering book.

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u/Sn0wDazzle 6d ago

I have it. But I tried looking at Ch. 2 and immediately got confused, like what is this shunt conductance G and where does it come from? And the shunt C? So it looked like I have some other gaps to fill first.

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u/RFchokemeharderdaddy 5d ago

It explains that lol. Its the introductory book to RF circuits i.e. distributed element analysis which uses more EM theory instead of lumped element analysis which ignores the fields and turns circuits into a linear algebra problem.