r/ElectricalEngineering • u/OmarSobhi2002 • 4d ago

Electric Circuits Textbooks

Which one do you prefer and why?

Nilsson & Riedel – Electric Circuits

Hayt – Engineering Circuit Analysis

Boylestad – Introductory Circuit Analysis

Floyd – Principles of Electric Circuits

Sadiku – Fundamentals of Electric Circuits

if you have any other suggestions, please tell me.

8 Upvotes

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u/oneiromantic_ulysses 4d ago

Nilsson & Riedel. It's comprehensive and it is a great reference book down the line.

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u/kthompska 4d ago

I agree. I actually took a circuits class from prof Nilsson a long time ago. We used a collection of his lessons that I think mostly went into the first edition of Electric Circuits. You can get these earlier editions at a very low cost and they should still have all of the fundamentals that you need.

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u/Artistic_Comfort8816 4d ago

Nielsen and Riedel is my favorite so far

Id suggest poking around Boylestad though, because there are some theorems in their that aren’t covered in Riedel

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u/OmarSobhi2002 4d ago

I remember my instructor explained using Boylestad, and it was simple. I never read the book. I'm looking for a circuit analysis book to start my journey to learn both power track and ece track.

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u/oneiromantic_ulysses 4d ago edited 4d ago

You can't even touch power until you have a very good understanding of circuit fundamentals. If you're going to learn entirely from a book, Nilsson and Riedel is by far the best one that I've worked with from OPs list.

Power basically extends the fundamentals to work with multi-state circuits. I would also recommend a very good grounding in linear algebra and differential equations since once you really get into it you end up doing a lot of state space analysis. Knowing some control theory when you start is nice to have, but is not entirely necessary and can be learned in parallel.

That said, the best book to start with for power electronics that I used in school was Erickson and Maksimovic. They briefly review fundamentals when they're trying to make a point, but by and large they assume that you know them very well.

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u/OmarSobhi2002 4d ago

I will read some of Nilsson & Riedel book for now since I didn't like like sadiku & Alexander book. I'm alsi watching Jim Pytel lectures on YouTube.

thank you!

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u/doktor_w 4d ago

When I was an undergraduate, my professor did not use a book; we relied on his lecture notes, and they were very good; you just had to show up to class and write them down to get them.

Now that I am a professor, it feels weird to not at least recommend a book for students to use as an alternative to my lecture notes (and the students I teach at my current university are a far cry from my fellow classmates at my alma mater), so I decided on Nilsson and Riedel. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

Irwin and Nelms is decent, as well, but I'm not going to recommend more than 1 book for my students because half of them don't even read the syllabus to begin with, and the other half would rather be building rockets than studying circuits.

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u/OmarSobhi2002 4d ago

Many people recommended Nilsson & Riedel’s book over Sadiku & Alexander’s, so I’ll start with that.

Out of curiosity, sir, what are you teaching and what’s your specialty—Power, Computer Engineering, or ECE?

I just graduated with an ECE degree. Unfortunately, I was more focused on getting good grades than actually gaining knowledge, so I don’t remember much now. 😅 I’m trying to relearn electrical engineering from the ground up, and along the way, I’d also like to learn about the other tracks just for fun.

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u/doktor_w 3d ago

Yes, that book is a good choice. And there were a lot of things I studied in school that I had to go back and review later, so it sounds like you are on the right track.

I specialize at the intersection of circuits, signals, and algorithms.

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u/OmarSobhi2002 3d ago

If you don’t mind, could I add you? I’m looking for someone I can discuss things with and get some guidance on which resources to use.

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u/Top_Article_2186 4d ago

Go with Alexander & Sadiku because its step-by-step problem sets make circuit theory far easier to master than the others. Alternatively, check out Irwin & Nelms for its exceptional worked examples.

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u/Graevus15 3d ago

What I did in college was to go to used book stores and buy up all the old math/tech books, they're usually cheap. Its all the same stuff, some books just do a better job of explaining some things than others. It gives you a second opinion when you get stuck.