Engineering and ideology

The book under discussion is an outgrowth of a freshman engineering course at the University of Massachusetts in which students take four 1-semester-unit mini-courses in various areas of engineering. A total of 13 authors have contributed to the book. Each chapter, after the first, deals with a specific area in a relatively broad and interesting way. Example are transportation, energy, air pollution, computers, materials, communications, and bridge building. The one anomaly, which clearly is out of place here, is the chapter titled Fundamentals of Electrical Networks, which goes into the usual gory details. This chapter contains more equation than the entire remainder of the book.